Eric Fonoimoana at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia, where he became the first Mira Costa alum to win a gold medal. Photo by Peter Brouillet

Olympic High: How Mira Costa produced 16 Olympians 

by Mark McDermott  

The path to Mount Olympus is never an easy one. But in the middle of July 1976, Alio and Constance Fonoimoana drove 2,868 miles, from Manhattan Beach to Montreal, Canada, with five of their six kids packed into a Dodge van. They were headed to the Summer Olympics.  

They’d equipped the van with a makeshift bed, so Alio, Constance, and their oldest daughter, Debbie, could take turns resting between shifts at the wheel. Only a month earlier, their daughter Lelei, the only Fonoimoana not in the van, had graduated from Mira Costa High School. Now she was about to compete for Team USA in the 100-meter butterfly and the 4 X 100-meter medley.

Alio, who’d moved to Manhattan Beach from Hawaii as a teenager and had starred on 1952’s Pioneer League championship Mustang football team, was not about to miss his daughter’s Olympics. Nor would any of his kids. Alio was a plumber, but also coached. This was a teaching moment.

“My dad was a hard working plumber and disciplinary figure,” his son, Eric, would later write. “He was also my coach in all sports.”

Eric was 7 at the time, the youngest in the family. What he beheld in Montreal that week would help shape the rest of his life.

“I watched all the athletes in Montreal,” he said. “And with my sister there, it felt like, ‘Everyone has a chance to get to the Olympics.’ If my sister can do it, I can do it. It just became that belief system.”

Lelei won a silver medal in the 4 X 100 medley, becoming the third Mira Costa Olympian, and the first to medal. Twenty-four years later, Eric Fonoimoana would himself become an Olympian, competing with partner Dain Blanton in beach volleyball at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia. He would become the second Mustang Olympian to win a gold medal.

The path from Mira Costa to the Olympics has become surprisingly well-trodden. Three former Mira Costa athletes competed at this year’s Paris Olympics: triathlete Taylor Spivey, decathlete Dan Golubovic, and water polo player Jordan Raney. And while it is unusual that a single Olympics includes three athletes from the same high school – only one other high school has two athletes represented – Mira Costa’s presence at the Olympic Games has become somewhat usual. Since 1964, when indoor volleyball players Mike Bright and Sharon Peterson became the first Mustang Olympians, former MCHS athletes have competed in all but three Summer Olympics in which Team USA has participated (the United States boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Moscow). 

Mira Costa has produced 16 Olympians in 50 years. While neither Team USA nor the International Olympic Committee keep records for high school alumni appearances, unofficially it appears that Woodrow Wilson High in Long Beach would hold such a record, producing 38 Olympians over the last 72 years (including two in this year’s Olympics). But Chuck Currier, the former Mira Costa teacher who is also the school’s unofficial historian, said there is a big difference between Long Beach and Manhattan Beach – one is a major metropolitan area, with over 450,000 residents. The other a small town, with 34,000 residents. In other words, Manhattan Beach produces more Olympians per capita than Wilson High. 

Currier, who also helped found Mira Costa’s alumni Hall of Fame, said that the achievement of MCHS alumni – which include world renowned physicists, doctors, authors, musicians, business leaders, as well as Olympians – are all the more incredible due to their small-town roots.  

“These are incredible people who lived right down the street from you,” he said. “They ate at the Kettle. They went to Mickey’s Delicatessen in Hermosa. They were surfing next to you. They were skateboarding with you growing up. You know, it’s not some distant star. They lived next door. We sat in the same rooms, shared many of the same teachers. There is that connection you don’t get very often, just a very warm feeling. ‘We know these people. These are our people.’”  

The 16 Olympians Mira Costa has produced are: Sharon Peterson, 1964 and 1968 Olympics, indoor volleyball; Mike Bright, ’64 and ’68, indoor volleyball; Lelei Fonoimoana, 1976, swimming; Jeff Atkinson, 1988, track (1500 meter); Carol Bower, 1984, rowing; Bryan Ivie, 1992, 1996, indoor volleyball; Mike Dodd, 1996, beach volleyball; Barbra Fontana, 1996, beach volleyball; Carl Henkel, 1996, beach volleyball; Holly McPeak, 1996, 2000, 2004, beach volleyball; Eric Fonoimoana, 2000, beach volleyball; Alix Klineman, 2020, beach volleyball; Taylor Spivey, 2024, track (triathlon); Dan Golubovic, 2024, track (decathlon); and Jordan Raney 2024, waterpolo.  

How and why did 16 Olympians come from one small town high school? Even Currier, among the most avid of Costa boosters, offered no explanation. He also said that Mira Costa’s Olympic legacy flies somewhat under the radar. Several of the Olympians, he noted, have not even made the MCHS Hall of Fame, as yet.

“Somehow, these people need to be nominated,” Currier said.

Fonoimoana likewise offered no theory as to how a town of 36,000 people produced 16 Olympians, although he offered a guess. 

“Maybe the water?” he said. “I mean, we are a small town, and a very sports-driven community, but to have that many Olympians out of one little area seems really strange and incredible. There are a lot of communities, like ours, who are sports fanatics. Why did 16 come out of one school? I don’t know. It’s pretty amazing.”

Councilperson Steve Napolitano, a Manhattan Beach native, said his hometown’s Olympic presence makes sense to him.

“It’s no surprise that we have a lot of Olympians from Manhattan Beach and the South Bay, especially in volleyball and water sports,” Napolitano said. “We’ve got a wide beach with deep sand, we’ve got the ocean where we can swim and surf year round, and we’ve got the programs, coaches, school sports and parents who throw their full support and resources behind our kids so they can shine. We are very fortunate and the results show that.”

The example of another small town buttresses at least one part of Napolitano’s argument. Norwich, Vermont, population 3,000, has produced 11 Olympians —  all in winter sports, skiing and snowboarding, due to the mountainous and wintry nature of Vermont. Writer Karen Crouse wrote a book about how Norwich produced so many Olympians, and what she found went beyond geography. She identified three aspects of the way kids are raised in Norwich she believed helped produce Olympians: “Treat your neighborhood’s children as your own,” “Frame sports as fun,” and “Let kids  own their own activities.”

“Parents encourage their kids to simply enjoy themselves because they recognize that more than any trophy or record, the life skills sports develop and sharpen are the real payoff,” Crouse wrote. “The town’s approach runs counter to the widespread belief — propagated by those perpetuating the professionalized youth sports complex — that athletic excellence and a well-balanced childhood cannot coexist.”

It also might have something to do with success building upon success, or, as Fonoimoana put it, “that belief system,” in which kids grow up seeing Olympians come from their hometown and the dream seems attainable. 

Which makes the story of one of Mira Costa’s first Olympians more remarkable.

Sharon Peterson didn’t even play volleyball as a Mustang because in the early 1960s Mira Costa didn’t field a girls volleyball team. Peterson told Richard Hessenius, who wrote a book on the history of MCHS athletics called “Mustangland,” that she’d played volleyball at American Martyrs in 8th grade.  

“When I went to high school, I was so disappointed because they really didn’t have anything except GAA, which was a high level of physical education (but did not involve competition with other schools),” Peterson said.  

She attended El Camino College after high school and was spotted playing volleyball on the beach by her future coach at Cal State Long Beach, who recruited her. Peterson became a two time All American and played both in the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo and 1968 in Mexico City.  She did not win an Olympic medal with those teams, but did win a Gold at the 1967 Pan Am Games, and was the US Player of the Year in 1969.

Mike Bright was the other pioneering Mira Costa Olympian, who likewise played indoor volleyball at the 1964 Olympics. Bright graduated from MCHS almost a decade earlier, in 1955, where he’d been an All-American basketball player as well as a volleyball player. He was also an accomplished waterman, winning the 32-mile Catalina Classic paddleboard race in 1956 and 1957. Bright competed in the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia in paddleboarding, surfing, and indoor volleyball, when all three sports were only considered exhibition events. He would later win a record five consecutive Manhattan Open beach volleyball tournaments and be inducted into the California Beach Volleyball Hall of Fame, and the Surfers Walk of Fame, both in Hermosa Beach.

The next Mira Costa Olympian would not appear until Lelei Fonoimoana competed as a swimmer in the 1976 Olympics. She remains MCHS’s lone Olympian swimmer. It was rare for an athlete to go straight from high school to the Olympics – in her case, within a month of graduating from Mira Costa – but what was even more rare is that her renown as a swimmer had begun even earlier, at age 15, when she helped set a new American record time in the 4 X 100 medley relay. The Hall of Fame at Brigham Young University, where she would attend college, described Lelei as a “teenage phenomenon” by the time her collegiate career began. “Noted for her intense concentration and lengthy workouts in the Richards Building pools, Lelei subsequently put BYU on the national swimming charts,” read her induction to BYU’s Hall of Fame. “She amassed a total of 11 All-America awards, nearly double the number earned by any other BYU female athlete.”

In addition to winning a silver medal at the Montreal Olympics, Fonoimoana finished seventh in the 100 meter butterfly, missing a bronze medal by five-tenths of a second.

The United States boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Carol Bower, an MCHS alum who’d attended UCLA and earned a scholarship on the Bruin’s rowing team, had been on the USA team in 1980 and had her hopes of becoming an Olympian dashed. “Of course the Olympics come every four years,” she later told PBS, “What that taught me at the age of 24 was there’s no certainty in this world.”

But she kept rowing, and four years later, the Olympics came to Los Angeles and she rowed her way to a gold. She was the first Mustang Olympian to win a gold medal. 

“The difference between training for the ’80 team and training for the ’84 team was I was every bit as committed,” Bowers told PBS. “I said that I was going to be every bit as ready, but if the chance should come, not when the chance comes. That’s the way I’ve approached my whole life.”

The next Costa Olympian was runner Jeff Atkinson won the 1988 Olympic trials and ran in the 1500 meter race in the Seoul Olympics. He led the race on the third of its four laps, and finished tenth. He held the U.S. record at that distance until 2005, and still holds the one mile record at Stanford University, where he went to college. Atkinson, in a 2009 interview, echoed the “sports as life skills” approach.

“It’s not about becoming pro or making the Olympics,” Atkinson said. “It’s about providing opportunities for success, defined as the best you can be on any given day with the tools you’ve been given,” he said. 

“You do have to have the drive and a reason to do all that work for a very esoteric goal. I feel like running is a noble pursuit and an honorable way to spend your time on planet earth.”

With one lap to go in the 1988 Olympic 1500m finals in Seoul, Korea, Jeff Atkinson runs shoulder-to-shoulder with eventual gold medal winner Peter Rono of Kenya. Photo courtesy of the Atkinson family

Bryan Ivie was on the 1992 Team USA indoor volleyball team that won a bronze medal in Barcelona. He was a late bloomer at Mira Costa, not taking up volleyball until his junior year. He didn’t make the varsity team until his senior year, in 1987. He made up for lost time quickly. He was twice named NCAA player of the year and won national championships with USC in 1988 and 1990. His much-anticipated arrival on the USA Volleyball team at the Barcelona Olympics got off to a rough start when Ivie injured a knee. The team’s opening match victory against Japan was reversed due to a teammate’s skirmish with a referee. But the team, and Ivie, would bounce back, in a legendary manner. Every player shaved their heads in solidarity with the player who’d been penalized, Bob Samuelson, and the team was dubbed “The Bald Eagles of Barcelona” as they fiercely fought their way back into contention. In the medal-winning match, Ivie was back, leading Team USA with 23 kills.

In 1996, Ivie returned to the Olympics, but this time he was accompanied by five other former Mustangs. Beach volleyball had been named an Olympic sport, and former Costa indoor volleyball stars Holly McPeak, Barbra Fontana, Mike Dodd, and Carl Henkel each competed on the beach at the Atlanta Olympics. Additionally, Cliff Meidl was on Team USA as a kayaker.

Dodd, who’d been a star basketball player at MCHS and went on to play that sport at San Diego State, is among the most gifted athletes the school has produced. He’d been drafted by the NBA’s San Diego Clippers and after missing the cut went back to volleyball, making USA Volleyball’s star-studded teams of the early ‘80s only to be cut before the Olympics when his amateur status was called into question due to his participation in a very brief, unsuccess professional beach league. He was now 38 years old and both surprised and awed to find himself an Olympian. He didn’t understand the magnitude of it until he stepped onto the court wearing a USA uniform. 

“Out there playing, you feel something different than anything else that you’ve done,” Dodd said on the Sandcast podcast a few years ago. “I’ve played in hundreds of opens, I’ve won 75 opens, five Manhattan Beach Opens. But nothing is like the pressure of representing not only yourself, not just your family, not just your city, but your country. It’s something that is hard to quantify unless you experienced it.”

The Mira Costa High billboard in 1996 saluted six alumni who were going to that year’s Olympics in Atlanta. Photo courtesy of two-time Olympian Cliff Meidl (Class of ‘84)

The path Meidl took to the Olympics was among the most improbable and daunting in Olympian history. He graduated from Mira Costa in 1987. While he had been a runner, Meidl never reached an elite level. And then, two years after graduating, he was working at a construction site when the jackhammer he was using struck three live power cables, sending 30,000 volts through his body, blowing off two toes, parts of his knees and shoulder blades. He suffered three heart attacks, but miraculously survived. Three years and 17 surgeries later, he began paddling with the Lanakila Outrigger Canoe Club in King Harbor. He’d paddled before his accident, but this time it was different. He was determined to use the gift of his living body like never before. He began kayaking in 1992 and by 1996 he was an Olympian. 

In an interview last month, Meidl credited Lanakila for helping revive his inner fire, and his brother Norman for motivating him to “use the tools you have.” 

Meidl would return four years later for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia. This time, he would both compete as a kayaker and serve as the flag-bearer for Team USA in the opening ceremony. He wrote about the experience for the official Olympic website. 

“As we were waiting to march into the stadium, an official was shouting “Team USA, get ready”, and I remember telling myself, whatever you do, don’t trip,” Meidl wrote. “My heart was beating out of my chest because I was so proud and honored. I could see the huge TV screen and all of a sudden, the cameras were on Team USA. I remember taking a deep breath and looking behind me, and all I could see for a quarter of a mile was a sea of red, white and blue. That’s when all of the emotions hit me.” 

It was also at the Sydney Olympics that Eric Fonoimoana became an Olympian. His inspiration had not only come from his sister Lelei, but his oldest sister Debbie. She’d been an elite athlete, as well, but grew up before Mira Costa fielded many women’s sports teams. She later played volleyball for UCLA, and afterwards played beach volleyball, finishing fourth at the 1975 Manhattan Open. Watching her was her little brother, who wrote an Instagram post after she passed away last year from cancer crediting her for his subsequent career. 

“I will forever be grateful to her for introducing me to the sport of volleyball when I was 5,” he wrote. “They called me the mascot of their team. Her competitive spirit was passed on to me at a young age. I love you Deb.” 

 

Fonoimoana had just missed the cut in 1996, when he’d fallen ill during the qualifying process.  He was determined to make it 2000. But he had an unexpected obstacle —  the AVP.  Professional volleyball had by now become a big money sport, and league officials were unhappy that Fonoimoana and Blanton were spending a lot of time overseas, playing FIVB tournaments in order to qualify for the Olympics. Things became so tense that they were banned from the AVP for periods of time as punishment. But they kept going. 

“We went seven weeks in a row, seven qualifiers, and made it out of all seven of them,” he said. “But you know, that’s a brutal road, because if you don’t make it out of a qualifier, you are there for a week, trying to figure out where to train and stay in shape. It’s not easy, playing around the world.” 

This was also before USA Beach Volleyball was well organized, so they had to travel at their own expense. Fonoimoana remembers risking both his sanity and his livelihood on his long path to the Olympics. All elite athletes need to make sacrifices in their devotion to their sport, but Olympians, perhaps more. 

“Sacrifices,” Fonoimoana said. “Family and friends,  those are are sacrifices, because you don’t get to spend time with them. Relationships are lost because you are not near them. I was basically gone for two years.” 

They qualified at the very last event, and had less than a month before the Olympics began. They were underdogs, seeded ninth, and even USA Volleyball wasn’t exactly pleased with them, because they’d let the powers that be know that the conditions they had to endure in their qualifying process needed to be addressed in the future. Fonoimoana was exhausted, and the Olympic competition, featuring all the truly elite two-man teams in the world, hadn’t even begun yet. 

“The ride,” he said, “was extremely challenging.” 

But in Sydney, they found an unexpected ally. The crowds. Fonoimoana and Blanton had a brash, exuberantly athletic style of play, and the Australians loved them. 

“Their crowds started cheering for us and we were trying to feed off their energy,” he said. “You use whatever you can get. This wasn’t our home base. It wasn’t all Americans in the stands.” 

They peaked at exactly the right time and made the finals. Their opponents were the top seeded team in the world, Ze Marco de Melo and Ricardo Santos of Brazil. They won the match when Fonoimoana rose through the air to block a powerful hit from Santos, an otherworldly leap that seemed to freeze time momentarily as the ball fell into the sand on the other side of the net. 

“I couldn’t believe what just happened,” Fonoimoana said in an interview with Easy Reader shortly after those Olympics. “It was all in slow motion. After the block, I watched the ball hit the ground and thought, ‘What does that mean?’ It means the match is over. It means we’ve won the gold medal and all the stuff we’ve been doing has paid off.”

Fonoimoana pauses when asked if everything they went through on their Olympic journey was worth it. 

“In hindsight, it was worth it,” he said. “Being a part of that Olympic Games is super special. It’s the experience of a lifetime that no one can pay for, right?” 

He’s also proud to have left a lasting impact on the USA Volleyball program. 

“The program developed because we were fighting so much with USA Volleyball, saying, ‘This is not right. You have to put money towards the beach program. You can’t just spend it all on the indoor program. They are two different sports that need two different support systems,” Fonoimoana said. “And by the time we left, it got a little bit better. I think we had a lot to do with that.” 

At the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Holly McPeak was the lone Mira Costa alum. It was her third consecutive Olympics, but she had yet to medal. McPeak was 35 years old, and she was not the kind to stop short of her goal. She wanted a medal. 

McPeak first made her mark at Mira Costa, a 5-foot-7 force of nature. She was part of two CIF championship teams, including a 29-0 season in 1986, her junior year. MCHS Coach DaeLea Aldrich saw an unstoppable quality in her star player.

“She’s a great athlete who will do anything you ask, and she’ll do it twice as hard,” Aldrich said. “She’s the girl who does the extra mile and the extra lifting in the off season.”

McPeak would go the extra mile over and over again for the next two decades. Because of her relatively small stature —  in volleyball, a sport dominated at its highest levels by taller athletes —  she had to do more to prove herself. She had committed to USC. But when they also brought in a 6-foot-1 setter, McPeak, always wary of being underestimated due to her size, instead went to UC Berkeley. It was a lesser volleyball program but she was determined to make it elite. She was the Pac-10 Freshman of the Year and was in the process of turning the school’s volleyball around when a new coach came in who didn’t share McPeak’s fire. Mystifyingly, she ended up off the team —  free to keep her scholarship, but not to play volleyball. Her inter-conference transfer to UCLA would normally require a two year gap in playing, an eternity for an elite athlete. McPeak being McPeak, she overturned the rule, receiving letters of support from every athletic program in the conference. McPeak joined the Bruins and the team went 36-1 and won a national championship. She set a single season record of 2,192 assists as well as an astonishing single match record of 97 assists.

Her Olympic journey was no less unlikely. By 1996, McPeak had become one of beach volleyball’s biggest stars, but in the process of qualifying for the Olympics, her partner, Nancy Reno tore her rotator cuff. They were the best team in the world and had already qualified for the Olympics in Atlanta, but for the next six months, they were not able to train together. McPeak refused to drop Reno, who wasn’t able to play until just weeks before the Olympics. They finished a disappointing fifth. In 2000, the same thing happened with a different partner, Misty May, who tore an abdominal muscle and ended up serving underhand in an incredible victory that qualified them for the Sydney Olympics. But the injury likewise impacted their training and rhythm and they finished in fifth place. 

Finally, in Athens in 2004, McPeak arrived at the Olympics with a healthy partner, Elaine Youngs. She was 36 by that time, but her game was never dependent on her elite athleticism. It was about her elite grit. They lost to May and Kerry Walsh (another Manhattan Beach resident, but not a Costa alum) in the semifinals but rebounded to beat an Australian team to win a bronze medal.

“Being on the podium in 2004 was incredible, because of all that heartbreak, to finally get there,” McPeak said on the Sandcast podcast. “I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me? I need to get up there.’” 

“I mean, in my journey, there’s a lot of pain, and some dips in the road, challenges, obstacles, actually a lot of them,” McPeak said. “But this day, I wouldn’t change anything. I learned so much. I feel like I can survive anything. You talk about grit and perseverance – those are skills that you’re not taught. People can’t say, ‘Here’s grit.’ You can’t do that. You earn it. You earn it by being in tough situations.”

Another Mustang would not appear in the Olympics until 2021 in Tokyo, when Alix Klineman won a gold in beach volleyball. Hers was an unlikely journey of another sort. Klineman, a 6-foot-5 outside hitter, was one of the most dominant athletes to ever play at MCHS. She led her Mustang teams to three state titles and was the national high school player of the year in 2006, her senior year. Her coach, Aldrich, told the LA Times that Klineman’s greatness wasn’t simply her elite physical gifts. 

“It’s her heart, it’s her soul, just the passion for the game,” Aldrich said. “That’s what you really call an elite athlete, someone who just has that passion and drive to do everything, and sacrifice everything, so they can become good in the sport.”

At Stanford, Klineman was a four-time All-American and again national player of the year. But after college, she did not immediately gravitate to beach volleyball, and instead attempted to become an Olympian through the indoor game. Heartbreakingly, in 2016, she was left off the USA Volleyball Olympic team, a 12 person squad in which 25 players started camp and were dropped, one by one. Klineman is known for the joy with which she plays the game, and this environment was not conducive. She was not surprised on the day she was told not to come back into the gym. 

“I just never was able to kind of feel that comfort or that security on the national team, and I knew it was affecting the way I played,” she later said on the Just Women’s Sports podcast. 

In 2017, an aging beach volleyball legend, April Ross, recruited her as a partner. Klineman made a quick transition to the beach game, and the team immediately became one of the AVP’s best duos. 

“The thing that was really alluring is that on the beach, there’s no coach putting you on a roster, or cutting you from a roster,” Klineman said on the podcast. “You are playing in these tournaments, you get points. If you have enough points, you get into the next tournament like it’s just very cut and dry. That really appealed to me.” 

Ross was taking a chance on her. The reality was that Klineman was an inexperienced beach player, and, at 28, no longer young. Their larger goal was the Olympics. Ross had medaled twice, but never won a gold.  She would be 39 by the time the Olympics came. But in Klineman, she believed she’d found the right partner. They dubbed themselves “the A Team.” 

Klineman said the contrast to her experience on the USA Volleyball indoor teams was striking. Her experience in 2016 had left a deep imprint. 

“In order for me to make a roster, someone else has to not make a roster,” she recalled. “So it’s very cutthroat, and I think everybody knew that —  people are only looking out for themselves. It didn’t have the magic of the environment that I had on the beach.” 

And then the pandemic hit. The 2020 Olympics were postponed, but Ross and Klineman stuck together. Finally, in the summer of 2021, the Olympics were held. They entered the Games as the fifth seeded team. They not only never lost a match, but only lost one set. They won the gold by defeating an Australian team that had beaten them three out of five times in other competitions. It was an eerie scene, a beach volleyball stadium with no fans, on a bizarrely hot day, with temperatures reaching 99 degrees. As they embraced in victory, Klineman remembered wondering if this was real. 

“There was a lot of disbelief,” she said on the podcast interview, which took place two months after her Olympic victory. “We just kept looking at each other like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe we won gold.’ Especially for me, I had gone through quite a lot of failure on the national team leading up to the beach, and so there was a part of me that was just like, ‘Can this really happen? Can this really turn out as good as I’m hoping and dreaming and thinking that it will?” 

“As athletes, it’s so hard to finish first,” Klineman said. “Only one team does. There’s a lot of great athletes and teams that are so close. But there can only be one.” 

Two of the three Mira Costa athletes at the 2024 Paris Olympics have come to the end of their Olympian dreams, as both Taylor Spivey and Dan Golubovic’s events are over.

Spivey finished 10th in the women’s decathlon after a difficult leg in the Seine River, which had to be disappointing for an athlete who thrives in the water. But she earned redemption earlier this week, when her Team USA four-person crew took the silver in the Triathlon Mixed Relay.   

“It feels so incredible,” Spivey told the Team USA website. “All of us didn’t have the best individual race. I don’t know why. We just couldn’t put it together. But we could put it together today, and we made it count. To walk away with the silver medal is really special.”

Jordan Raney’s journey is ongoing. The USA women’s water polo team is in the semifinals, and looks to win its fourth straight gold medal. 

But Fonoimoana, who is foregoing work while glued to the television this week back in Manhattan Beach, said that one thing that his fellow alums can look forward to —  regardless of outcome —  is that they get to come home. 

“I got to travel to amazing places, from France to Germany to Australia, to Spain and Brazil. I loved the travel part,” he said.  “But I couldn’t wait to get home. Our beaches are clean, we’re a beach community, it was just like, ‘Okay, let’s get back.’ There’s nothing like home.” ER 

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