At 7-1, Ryan Doherty delivers volleyball wins, not pizzas now

In a tournament where the athletes check in at the same table as the ticket-buying population, Ryan Doherty has trouble blending in.

At the Assn. of Volleyball Professionals Championships at Huntington Beach, fans walking by Doherty’s match stopped mid-stride and uttered some combination of an expletive and the phrase, “How tall is that guy?”

Doherty is 7 feet 1. He has a 7-foot-4 wingspan. Without jumping, his head goes about halfway up the net. With jumping, his arms reach to the top of the line extenders that rest on top of the net, 10 feet, four inches off the ground.

On Friday, Doherty and his partner, Nick Lucena, advanced out of the first round with a 21-15, 21-19, win. They form the No. 2-ranked team in this event, have made the finals in three of the last four AVP tournaments and are expected to make Sunday’s finals.

The 30-year-old Doherty got here by way of having nothing else to do, essentially. He played baseball at Notre Dame, then pitched for three years in the Arizona Diamondbacks organization as the first 7-footer in minor league history.

His career earned-run average in the minor leagues is 2.74, but when Doherty was released in 2007, no other teams came calling.

“All of a sudden, I’m an ex-baseball player, and I thought an ex-athlete,” Doherty said Friday. “Obviously I wasn’t going to be an athlete anymore, because the one sport I trained my whole life for was over.”

With no job or prospects, Doherty moved near the beach in Hilton Head, S.C., and crashed on his friend’s couch. The cushions ended near his shins, but it was better than nothing.

While working odd jobs, he had enough time to go to the beach every day. While there, his buddy saw some sand courts and figured that learning how to play volleyball with his 7-foot-1 friend could be fun. Doherty used to set up nets on the Jersey Shore as a childhood summer job, but hadn’t played the game much.

Initially, Doherty was terrible. He lost to high school girls, to a 5-foot-6 disc jockey and most everyone he played.

But, he was having fun. With $5,000 to his name, Doherty packed up his jeep with everything he owned and moved to Huntington, where he could play volleyball for free every day, whenever he wanted, without pretense of earning money from playing. He had no job, no place to live and not a lot of money, but Doherty had volleyball.

Every morning, he would show up on the beach, hoping a team would be missing a player. If not, he would practice serves by himself. Financially, Doherty supported himself by delivering pizza in Seal Beach. Locals knew him as the giant guy on the bike.

For three years, he had no real hope of playing professionally. He could block and spike well enough, but couldn’t pass or do any of the technical work that sets up those power moves.

As time went on, more people wanted to train against the long-armed new guy. With more experience came better training partners and better performance.

When the AVP went bankrupt in 2011, many of the top players needed jobs. Doherty, the pizza delivery man, wasn’t making much money and kept his routine going. In 2012, Casey Patterson, a Huntington Beach local and one of the best players in the country, approached Doherty to be his doubles partner for that season, the first since the bankruptcy.

It happened partially because Doherty was improving rapidly, but also because he wasn’t in an office with some of the other top players. The two won a couple of tournaments, and by the time the regulars got back, Doherty was good enough to hang with the competition.

Now, in his third season of professional volleyball, Doherty and Lucena are one of the tour’s best teams.

“It’s one of those things, like, did that really work for me?” Doherty said. “I drove across the country after being beaten by high school chicks and now I’m winning in the pros?”

His height gives Doherty the obvious advantages near the net, but he’s still learning that in order to pass and control the ball with a normal-sized partner, he has to get low. Shrinking is not exactly Doherty’s natural movement, but it’s part of the maturation process.

His best role model is Phil Dalhausser, the 6-foot-9 U.S. Olympian. Dalhausser, who withdrew from the Huntington Beach tournament because of an abdominal injury. has also teamed with Lucena and didn’t grow up playing volleyball but figured out how to use his size and won the gold in the 2008 Games.

Doherty, in his third year on the tour, is getting there.

Four men’s teams have won the six previous two-man events of the AVP tour. Two U.S. teams will go to Rio for the 2016 Olympics. There’s a realistic chance that one of those teams will have a player who was delivering pizzas three years ago.

“My buddy likes to tell me that in my mind, whatever I do to make myself happy, it works out,” Doherty said with a laugh. “I’m the guy who says I’m going to drive across the country without a job, and that’s what worked out for me. Now, I get to play volleyball all over the world. It’s nuts, but somebody has to get lucky. Might as well be me.”

Etc.

In the first round of the double-elimination tournament, the higher-seeded team won seven of the eight women’s matches Friday. The only upset came from the 12th-ranked team of Sarah Day and Christal Morrison Engle. The tournament favorites, Kerri Walsh Jennings and April Ross, won in two sets. … On the men’s side, brothers Tim and Brian Bomgren upset No. 6 Billy Allen and Trevor Crabb in three sets. Santa Barbara natives Jeremy Casebeer and Will Montgomery, seeded 13th, also advanced. Aside from those teams, the favorites rolled.