Brothers Trevor and Taylor Crabb hope to make waves on beach volleyball circuit

They might be brothers, but Trevor and Taylor Crabb are still in relatively new territory as teammates at the Kingston AVP Championships in Huntington Beach.

This weekend’s beach volleyball tournament marks just the fourth time Trevor, 26, and Taylor, 23, entered as main draw participants at an AVP event, and it’s shaping up in similar fashion to their first tournament at Manhattan Beach this summer.

At both double-elimination competitions, the Crabb brothers started out with a dominant two-set victory, followed by a crushing defeat to an established team. At Manhattan, they recovered to finish in third place, showing an unusual amount of promise for a young duo. They are confident they can do more of the same at Huntington after losing their second match Friday to Ryan Doherty and John Mayer, 21-14, 21-19.

“It’s always tough when you enter the losers’ bracket after the second match of the day, especially at Manhattan Beach where we had to play four games in a row on a Saturday to make it to the semifinals,” Taylor said. “It’s nice to know that we can do it. I’m not worried about heading to the contenders’ bracket. I’m ready for tomorrow.”

Trevor has been on the AVP tour since 2013, previously teaming with Steven VanderWerp, Billy Allen and Ty Tramblie. But the goal was always to play with his younger brother — who made the transition this summer from indoor volleyball to the beach —on a full-time basis.

“It was pretty difficult at first,” Taylor said. “With different muscles and jumping on the sand, it was a much different approach. But I’ve been playing beach [volleyball] my whole life growing up in Hawaii, so it didn’t take me too long” to adjust.

Though they’re partners now, Trevor and Taylor used to prefer facing off against one other.

“We always played with my dad and our older half-brother,” Taylor said. “We’d do two on two and one of us would get our dad and one of us would get our older brother. Nothing really broke out there because our dad was there to keep us under control. But there was a lot of arguing for sure.”

They might have kept it civil during beach volleyball games, but the same couldn’t be said for other activities.

“It was more with video games that things would get a little out of control,” Trevor said. “Throwing controllers and starting to wrestle after.”

Now, they are able to channel that occasional sibling rivalry into a more productive playing partnership.

“You’ll get frustrated with your partner, it happens all the time,” Trevor said. “But since we’re brothers, it’s easier to kind of brush it off. If one of us gets mad at each other, it’s not personal or anything.”

In fact, after a frustrating loss to Doherty and Mayer, Taylor managed to compliment his older brother, something that might not have happened a decade ago.

“It’s really been more about bettering myself to be the best I can be, not be better than someone else,” Taylor said. “But I mean, I’ve always looked up to him, seeing how he’s doing climbing up the ranks, getting better and better.”

alex.shultz@latimes.com