BATON ROUGE, La. — Mount Carmel's Kristen Nuss and her longtime beach volleyball partner Taryn Kloth will represent the United States at this 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris.
The Olympic qualifying season ended on Sunday and TKN is the top American team in the points standings, thanks in large part to winning the 2023 Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour Finals in Doha, Qatar, in December.
The victory was the third high-level gold for Kloth and Nuss this year, after wins at the La Paz Challenge and the Uberlandia Elite16.
TKN finished with the most points of any American team and second-most in the world.
It's a huge accomplishment for the former LSU duo, who WWL Louisiana has followed closely since they turned pro back in 2021.
WWL's Ricardo LeCompte caught up with the pair training in Baton Rouge.
"It definitely made all the hard workouts, the Louisiana summers being absolutely dead," Nuss told LeCompte. "We come train during the hottest part of the day and it definitely made those days worth it."
Kloth agreed.
"That's all we have been talking about for the last three or four years," she said. "So, to see the calendar finally flip to that year that we have been looking forward to, it was special."
The beach volleyball duo will train mostly in Baton Rouge and play in a few more tournaments, before the Paris Games this summer, and Baton Rouge happens to be the same place where Kloth and Nuss manifested that Olympic dream while at LSU.
"Yes we had other goals, but end all be all, Paris 2024 was up there," said Nuss. "And I don't know if we fully believed that like oh yes we can make that happen."
"It was really hard for me to say out loud in the beginning because it is such a big goal," Kloth added. "But saying it, it's really hard. And you did a really good job of saying and you were like, 'No, we have to believe that we can.'"
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