Pickerington volleyball player’s big dreams built in the sands of Central Ohio

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — Playing volleyball in the sand wasn’t always a day at the beach for Pickerington’s Myriah Massey.

“My mom made me do it as conditioning,” Massey said with a wry smile.

Her mom, Tabitha Furlong, knew that Massey didn’t want to do it at first.

“She was like absolutely not — I don’t want to run in sand!” Furlong said.

Family ties leading to postseason success in central Ohio

But a trip to Gulf Shores, Alabama to visit one of Furlong’s friends in 2017 changed everything. As an 11-year-old, Massey went to watch the NCAA Beach Volleyball Championships and decided to dig into the sport.

There was one problem. Living in Central Ohio, there are no beaches. So, where does one practice beach volleyball?

“Sure enough, within a couple hours later these girls roll by in bikinis that say, ‘Ohio Valley Beach’. So it was a mission to see who runs this Ohio Valley Beach.”

That was Rob Long – a staple in the United States beach volleyball community.

“Being from the midwest, we don’t have beach, right? So we had to create a facility,” Long said. “So we hit the ground running and started created programming here in Cincinnati that would enable these kids to accelerate.”

Massey started commuting a couple times a week down to Cincinnati to practice. And when she wasn’t there, she was training in Columbus at Ohio Volley Beach’s sister club, Elite Volleyball Training Center.

“She is definitely a cut above the rest with a lot of natural ability,” Massey’s coach in Columbus, Joe Jackson, said. “But as you can tell, she’s someone who works hard and wants to find all the available tools to be the best that she can so it’s pretty cool.”

In 2018, Massey won the 12U Beach Volleyball National Championships. Then, things really started to hit another level in 2020.

“COVID hit. You know we really couldn’t play indoor volleyball anymore. So we played a lot of beach,” Furlong said. “And it kinda exploded from there.”

Massey started garnering attention all across the country, including drawing the eye of beach volleyball legend Kerri Walsh-Jennings, a three-time Olympic gold medalist. Walsh-Jennings hand-selected Massey to take part of a new program that brings together the top 50 young beach volleyball players in the country.

“Myriah to me is just the epitome of consistent effort, consistent focus and a desire to be the best she can be,” Walsh-Jennings said. “What Fab50 has done is it’s allowed these high performing athletes to come together, share their stresses and realize, ‘Oh, I’m not the only one’ whether it’s off the court stuff or on the court stuff. And then they get access to compete against their best peers in the nation without any pressure on them.”

And what Walsh-Jennings has taught Massey is how to dream big.

“Obviously the Olympics is a super cool idea, that’s the biggest dream. But right now, winning a national championship in college, that’s the closest goal,” Massey said, donning her Florida State University beach volleyball t-shirt. “[Kerri has] taught me that beach is more than a sport. And that you are more than your sport.”

Which is why Massey has another dream. One that doesn’t involve medals or titles or trophies. She has her sight set on growing the sport of beach volleyball especially for young girls of color.

“If girls who look like Myriah see Myriah playing, then more girls are going to want to play,” Furlong said. “I’m excited for her to have that platform I hope she uses it just to give everybody a look at what you can do and it doesn’t matter what your skin color is.”

Massey says the beach volleyball community is super tight-knit in the United States.

“You play with your friends, you play against your friends — I think that’s my favorite part about it,” Massey said.

Massey is in her freshman year at Florida State on the beach volleyball team. She graduated from Pickerington Central a semester early to join the Seminoles’ program in January. She is redshirting this season and learning as much as she can from the FSU upperclassmen, who right now have the program riding a perfect 13-0 record and ranked No. 3 in the country.

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