TCU graduate student Daniela Alvarez’s hands and the spiked volleyball met just above
the tape for the briefest of moments Sunday, hovering in the in between of “almost”
and “National Champions.”
Then: block, point, game, set and a national championship for the TCU women’s beach
volleyball team.
“I’m having a hard time finding the words for what I am feeling because finishing
our college career like this was magical,” said Tatiana Moreno, Alvarez’s partner
on the No. 1 pair who clinched the 3-2 victory against Loyola Marymount. “There is
nothing in the world like college sports. This morning before we started, when we
saw them walking in, the chancellor, the president, the athletic director, it was
like wow … purple power. This is TCU.”
Victor J. Boschini, Jr., Daniel W. Pullin and Mike Buddie were not going to miss watching
TCU play for a national championship. They shuffled between courts, cheering as the
Horned Frogs’ No. 4 pair, Anhelina Kmil and Ana Vergara, and No. 3 pair, Sofia Izuzquiza
and Allanis Navas, beat LMU.
With LMU winning at Nos. 2 and 5, though, the match came down to Alvarez and Moreno.
Playing in their last match as Horned Frogs, the Olympians from Spain dropped the
first set 18-21 but came back to win 21-15 and 15-6, with Alvarez’s block deciding
the match.
“People don’t really grasp how difficult it is to win a Division I athletic contest
and, to win a national championship, the work is unbelievably difficult,” said Buddie,
who became TCU’s director of intercollegiate athletics on Jan. 1. “They sometimes
make it look easy but the work that goes in behind the scenes, that stair step of
success and failure and success, it makes it totally worthwhile.”
The chaotic joy that ensued was everything fans love about sports — the Horned Frogs
rushing the sand, the endless hugging and dancing and Ole-ing, the pictures with the
trophy, the cutting of the net and then one final celebration. In beach volleyball,
they have a tradition at the national championship: the winner runs from the court
and into the ocean.
Only two teams have made this run in eight years of NCAA play: USC and UCLA. Until May 3, when TCU added its name.
The players led the way and succeeded in coaxing Buddie and Pullin into the waves
as well. Watching Horned Frog athletes and trainers, coaches and administrators, friends,
family and fans joyfully holding up the trophy in the ocean, this was exactly what
Pullin, the TCU president who will succeed Boschini as chancellor on June 1, envisioned
when athletics was made one of the four core pillars in TCU’s recently launched strategic
plan, LEAD ON: Values in Action. 
That pillar has a stated goal of winning 30 championships in the next 10 years. Already,
the Horned Frogs have notched Big 12 Championships in women’s soccer, women’s basketball,
men’s tennis and women’s beach volleyball before adding a national championship.
“We already are off to a strong start,” Pullin said. “Now, fresh off this national
championship and championships last year in tennis and rifle, there is a little bit
of TCU swagger. We’ve got confidence. Our shoulders are back, our head up. We’re proud
of the opportunities we are creating for our student-athletes.”
Opportunities both in athletics and academics. He and Buddie define success as giving
athletes the opportunity to earn a life-changing degree and do ocean runs after national
championships.
Amid that chaotic joy, Boschini stood just off the court, quietly taking in a scene
he had set into motion more than nine years ago. He had greenlit adding women’s beach
volleyball and oversaw the hiring of coach Hector Gutierrez to build a program from
scratch.
“When I got hired, I presented a plan and they weren’t scared for it,” Gutierrez said.
“They were just ‘Okay, let’s do it’. This is why I decided to come here because I
knew, when I talked to them, the school was behind it. Sometimes you go to a place
where they tell you what you want to hear but TCU is a place where, when they say
they are going to do something, they do it.”
Boschini remembers that moment with Gutierrez, and what made him say, “Okay, let’s
try this.”
“I loved how positive he was and also how realistic he was,” Boschini said. “Being
able to be here to watch them win a national championship really is a full-circle
moment.”
Listen back to the TCU Innovates podcast with Daniel Pullin and Hector Gutierrez when the Horned Frogs were in the Paris Olympics.