SARAH SPONCIL

The AVP is heading back to the beach with a bunch of new teams and a lot more tournaments for them to figure things out.

The American team of Sarah Sponcil and Kelly Claes were ousted from the Olympic beach volleyball tournament by Canada.

Belarus track sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya says her Olympic team officials tried to remove her from Japan in a dispute that led to a standoff Sunday evening at Haneda Airport in Tokyo.

"We’ve gotten kind of used to it, but it’s still weird," said Team USA athlete Kelly Claes.

Caeleb Dressel is expected to be the star of Day 7 at the Tokyo Games as he seeks his third gold medal in Friday night coverage of the Olympics.

April Ross was 24 years old when she first started playing beach volleyball, the sport that would eventually send her to four Olympics. At that age, Sarah Sponcil is already headed to the Summer Games. Sponcil and her 25-year-old partner, Kelly Claes, are the first generation to come up through an NCAA beach volleyball program that didn’t exist until 2012 — long after Ross graduated from Southern California.

Three-time beach volleyball gold medalist Kerri Walsh Jennings was defeated in her bid to reach the Olympics for a sixth time when she and partner Brooke Sweat lost in a qualifying match in Ostrava, Czech Republic.