Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson will swap one dramatic urban setting for another this weekend in the AVP Chicago Heritage Series tournament at Oak Street Beach.
Mel and Brandie, as they are known to their legion of fans worldwide, earned the silver medal in beach volleyball, representing Canada, while playing in the shadow of the iconic Eiffel Tower during the recent Paris Olympics.
Their first competition since the 2024 Games will take place on the Chicago lakefront, overlooked by the 100-story John Hancock tower and other spectacular skyscrapers at the north end of the Magnificent Mile.
During their bumpy road to the second step of the podium in Paris, Mel and Brandie broke the hearts of American fans by eliminating rivals Taryn Kloth and Kristen Nuss in the Round of 16. That earned them a bit of payback against the popular LSU grads (nicknamed TKN), who were seeded No. 2 in the Olympics. Kloth and Nuss won the 2023 Chicago AVP event with a three-set victory over the Canadians.
The top-tier Heritage Series stop today through Sunday is the final traditional “bracket” event on an abbreviated schedule before the financially challenged tour launches its AVP League series, which its new management team hopes will ramp up business. Eight events at tennis centers and indoor venues will feed into the championship on Nov. 9-10 at the tennis stadium in Carson, California.
Mel (the 5-9 waterbug-quick “Smiling Assassin”) and Brandie (at an undersized 5-10 one of the premier blockers in the world) clinched an automatic berth in the League, which resembles World Team Tennis, by winning the Heritage Series opener in mid-May at Huntington Beach in Southern California. They topped TKN in a three-set title match, prevailing 15-13 in the tiebreaker. Kloth and Nuss are automatic League entries, too, by virtue of their victory two weekends ago in the Manhattan Beach Open, beach volleyball’s “Wimbledon.” The Canadian pair skipped the MBO because, “I was on vacation,” as Humana-Paredes matter-of-factly told the Sun-Times.
Neither of the two highly touted American women’s teams in the Olympics — third-seeded Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes, the reigning world champs who were bounced in the quarterfinals, and Kloth-Nuss — advanced to medal contention. The U.S. men’s pairs of Miles Partain and Andy Benesh (quarterfinals), and ex-NBA player Chase Budinger and Miles Evans (Round of 16) also were eliminated before the medal rounds.
AVP regulars Mel, 31, and Brandie, 32, survived potentially catastrophic early speed bumps — their 1-2 record in pool play forced them to win a Lucky Losers match just to make the regular knockout rounds — by “approaching every game like it was a final,” Humana-Paredes said. Topping TKN ignited a power surge in the eternal City of Light that wasn’t extinguished until they dropped a third-set tiebreaker to top-seeded Brazilians Duda and Ana Patricia in the gold-medal match.
“It was not the road we foresaw,” Humana-Paredes said of their Olympic experience. ‘‘The position we put ourselves in was a severe wake-up call heading onto that Lucky Losers match.”
The world of elite globe-trotting beach-volleyball athletes never stops spinning, even though Mel admitted, “I’m still coming down from Paris a little bit.” Humana-Paredes said the team’s “focus is on Chicago and the AVP League in the fall. We’re trying to live in the moment and finish out this year strong. Then we’ll regroup and plan for what the next couple of years will look like.”