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Pro volleyball stars Tim Brewster & Kyle Friend are officially dating
These volleyball partners are now also dating — and it’s all just too adorable!
A partnership on and off the court!
Pro beach volleyball players Tim Brewster and Kyle Friend, both athletes for the Association of Volleyball Professionals (AVP), are not only partners in a match, but they’re also an actual couple and have been dating for some time now.
Brewster and Friend opened up about their romantic relationship in a profile for Volleyball Magazine and shared other details during an episode of the Sandcast podcast. After meeting as beach volleyball players in the summer of 2022, Friend felt like Brewster started “figuring [him] out” — in a good way, of course!
“Seeing an example of someone who is out and confident and able to do volleyball, I’d never been around that,” Brewster told Volleyball Magazine. “To see somebody like that helped me through a lot of these internal struggles I was having. Obviously, I worked really hard and there was a lot of stuff I did to make my volleyball really good. But there’s also a mental component, whether it was confidence or being comfortable, [that] helped my volleyball click. It made a huge difference for me on and off the court. It was cool for me to see that journey.”
As they started playing together as a duo and identified a successful partnership in volleyball, their first instinct was to keep things professional between them. “It’s funny because, early on, we were like ‘Let’s protect the volleyball. We’re playing such good volleyball, we need to protect that,” Brewster explained. “So naive. Looking back on it a year and a half ago, [it’s] crazy that we were saying that. And now we need to make sure we’re taking care of the off-the-court [relationship] first, because that is what’s most important.”
Seriously, how adorable are these two?!
When it comes to their continued success as a beach volleyball team, Brewster believes that their personal relationship is actually very helpful.
“There’s an incentive to figure it out on the court because it has to stay on the court,” Brewster said. “It helped us that we played together for six months before the off-the-court relationship started, so we had those boundaries of what the on-the-court relationship looked like. We know how to keep the two separate. We know how to bind it up and keep it as separate as they can be, so they don’t bleed into one another.”
All our congratulations to Tim Brewster and Kyle Friend for being such great examples of out LGBTQ+ athletes, figuring out how to make things work for them on- and off-the-court, and now disclosing their incredibly inspirational love story!
Bernardo Sim is a writer, editor, and content creator. Born in Brazil, he currently lives in South Florida. You can follow him on Instagram at @bernardosim.
Bernardo Sim is a writer, editor, and content creator. Born in Brazil, he currently lives in South Florida. You can follow him on Instagram at @bernardosim.
