Last September, amid the white sand and hot sun of California’s southern beaches, the Association of Volleyball Professionals (AVP) hosted its biggest tournament of the year: the Santa Barbara Open. Olympians and teammates Phil Dalhausser and Sean Rosenthal were favored to win their match in the opening round, so there was plenty of surprise—and a few smiles—to go around when the Californians, Dalhausser and Rosenthal, were brought down by two guys from…Minnesota?
Brian and Tim Bomgren, Woodbury natives and brothers, still grin with pride when they remember their victory last summer. “It was quite an accomplishment,” says Tim, 26. “Taking down two gold medalists is probably our biggest claim to fame so far.”
The Woodbury High School grads have been playing beach volleyball professionally for more than five years, touring on the AVP’s circuit and competing all over the U.S. during summer weekends. But how did two kids from the frozen north get involved with a sport that has the word “beach” in its name? “I started playing [indoor volleyball] competitively in college,” says Brian, 30, a Bethel University graduate. “About halfway through college, I started getting into beach volleyball.”
Tim followed in his brother’s footsteps and played competitive indoor volleyball at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. After college, the duo joined a small Minnesota beach volleyball tour and played in Midwest tournaments. “We started competing locally, and then had opportunities to travel to Wisconsin or Chicago to play in regional tours once or twice a summer,” Brian says.
Right away, the Bomgren brothers realized that they’d been bitten by the beach volleyball bug, and they never looked back. “The older I got, the more I liked beach volleyball [versus indoor] because of the two-on-two aspect,” Brian says. In traditional indoor volleyball, a team competes with six players on the court at all times. Beach volleyball, in contrast, has just two players per side, making partnership the rule of the day.
Tim Bomgren
Tim agrees. “Being responsible for 50 percent of the play versus one-sixth of the play is something we definitely enjoy.” Many volleyball partners feel a kind of brotherhood with each other, but for the Bomgrens, that brotherhood is literal. Is there any sibling rivalry on or off the beach? “We actually get along really well,” Tim says with a chuckle. “We both know we’re going to give it our all. From a physical perspective, I’m left-handed and Brian is right-handed, so in terms of which side of the court we play on, that makes it easier…we mesh well physically.”
“We’re both on the same page,” Brian says. “It allows us to be lighthearted with one another. If it’s the end of a tense match, Tim and I are laughing at each other when something goes wrong, where other teams might be bickering.”
The Bomgrens’ legacy has deep roots: Their dad Wally, who now coaches girls volleyball at Woodbury’s New Life Academy, spent most of 1978 training with the United States Olympic volleyball team, and has shared his passion since then as a respected coach at area schools. “My wife, Vickie, and I hoped as we raised our kids…that someday they’d pick up volleyball,” he says. “It’s been really fun to follow their careers.” Siblings David and Amy are both successful volleyball players in their own right, too, and Brian and Tim call their tight-knit family their “super fans.”
Even as many pros pick up and move to the volleyball hot spot of southern California, Brian and Tim Bomgren have stayed put near Woodbury. They both still hold day jobs—Brian is a quantitative research analyst for Thrivent Financial, and Tim is a technical lead for a local software company—and often practice at Conquer Fitness, an indoor sand volleyball facility in Crystal. And they still love being “the Minnesotans” at national volleyball events, says Brian with a laugh. “In Cali last summer…we were playing another guy who was from Minnesota. The announcer said, ‘Three of the four players on the sand are from Minnesota…That’s just weird.’”
Weird or not, the volleyball life sure is fun for the Bomgren brothers. In fact, it’s just beachy.
