Lauren Hattaway may have grown up over 1,000 kilometres from the nearest beach, but this summer she was perfectly at ease on the golden sand of the volleyball court.

From landlocked Kansas, USA, Hattaway scored a beach volleyball scholarship in the NCAA’s vaunted Division 1, before coming to Cambridge for an engineering master’s. This summer, she jump served the light blues to the European Universities Beach Championships.

All the more remarkable, Lauren and her tournament partner Julianna trained on sand just once all year, and, in between qualification and the continental finals, they were separated by seven time zones.

“I’ve been in Japan since my graduation last year and she was in the UK, so…”, Hattaway says with remarkable humour, having just trekked 55 hours back to the Land of the Rising Sun. “We qualified in the summer of, when even was it, 2024. And then the European Championships were one year later, in July 2025. It was kind of crazy!”

The pair’s achievements defy exaggeration; they were the only British university team to reach the Championships in Granada – swapping supervisions for Spanish sands, and the summit of European student sport. Cambridge is, after all, instantly equated with academia, and Hattaway tells me the tournament organisers were keen to milk the apparent irony: “At the opening ceremony they were like, oh they ditched the books for the court! You always get the classic introduction.”

“Swapping supervisions for Spanish sands, and the summit of European student sport”

Attempted witticisms aside, the biennial Championships are a serious deal. “They have all these people coming in,” she recalls off-handedly. “I was chatting with one of the referees. He was a line judge at the Paris Olympics.”

After a year on opposite sides of the planet, competing on such a stage would shake most athletes to the core – but to Lauren and Julianna it was a mere footnote. “There is no beach volleyball court in Cambridge. Kinda sucks,” Hattaway concedes, smiling as she reels off their adversities. “Ahead of qualification, we trained on sand only once at these artificial courts in London. That was it.”

Partnership is also paramount in the sport’s two player universe, yet the light blue duo came from different volleyball worlds. “Julianna is a very skilled indoor player … but she had scarcely played beach before; I was a full-fledged beach volleyball player. Strategically, the two sports are very, very different, so is the way that you play them,” Hattaway explains. Put more bluntly, if you take even top indoor players off sprung floors and onto the sand “they get their ass kicked”. Pair that stark assessment with a single practice session on sand, and the duo’s presence among Europe’s elite seems almost paradoxical.

“Hattaway spent the same amount of time playing sport as she did asleep”

But for Hattaway, success was already second nature. As an undergraduate at Florida International University she was crowned Student Athlete of the Month three times as well as Most Outstanding Mechanical Engineer, all while competing for the then-12th best college beach volleyball team in America. The catch? Hattaway literally spent the same amount of time playing sport as she did asleep: “It would end up being about four to six hours of every day, committed just to volleyball … and I maybe slept four to six hours a night.”

Excellence also came at a human cost: “I didn’t love my volleyball time in the US. I loved the intensity … but my situation there was not ideal in terms of how I was treated as a person,” Hattaway bravely discloses. Ironically, it was bookish Cambridge that rekindled her fondness for the sport. “It wasn’t that competitive, and sometimes it drove me a little nuts,” Hattaway laughs, “but Cambridge really healed my relationship with volleyball. I’ve shared this with the girls and it’s brought about tears.”

While Cambridge is notorious for academic pressure, Hattaway was impervious: “My undergrad was so much harder in terms of time management, in Cambridge … the workload was not that intense. I was like, I need to go to the gym more, this isn’t enough!”

Beach volleyball is an easy game to romanticise – think golden sands underfoot, sun-kissed summer days – but in Britain it remains firmly on the sporting fringes, and courtless Cambridge is no exception.

“Whenever I tell people I’m a beach volleyball player, they’re always like “oh l want to play beach volleyball!”” Hattaway grins. “It seriously makes me think “man, I should go back to Cambridge and open up some beach volleyball courts” – there will be people there all the time.” Could fantasy translate into reality? “To be honest, I think the University would have a hard time allowing sand in their facilities,” she chuckles wryly. But what’s a few loose granules to grow a sport?