TALLAHASSEE – Audrey Koenig was sorry. So very sorry.

Sorry to Jordan Polo and Carra Sassack. Sorry to Caitlin Godwin and Caitlin Moon. Sorry to anyone else on the Florida State beach volleyball team who happened to, in Koenig’s words, “get stuck” with her at practice.

“It was hard,” Koenig said of her first season on the beach in Tallahassee, in 2023. “It was definitely a lot. Just having to play with people and being worried that they got stuck with me, especially in the beginning, because I’d be paired with veteran players so they could teach me how to play and I would be like ‘I’m sorry, I’m still new to this.’ I’d feel bad for them, and this was such a different feeling for me. A lot of embarrassment, just putting yourself out there and messing up a lot.”

Koenig is a senior, technically a veteran herself at this point, though her age in years belies her age in the sport of beach volleyball. Yes, she played in tournaments growing up in Wesley Chapel, Florida, a suburb just north of Tampa. She’d pop over to Clearwater or St. Pete when there was a juniors’ tournament in town, grabbing her best friend just “to keep our touch,” she said. “No strategy, I never blocked.”

Beach wasn’t the priority. Indoor volleyball, where the 6-foot-3 Koenig was a can’t miss recruit, ranked No. 72 in the nation, was the focus. Chris Poole and Florida State brought Koenig to Tallahassee, and her impact was more immediate than even Poole could have anticipated in his most bullish assessment: 262 kills in her freshman season, the most by an FSU rookie since 2006. Two years later, Koenig shared ACC Co-Player of the Year honors with Louisville’s Anna DeBeer.

Which is when Brooke Niles had a proposition.

“Want to come play beach in the spring?”

It was Poole’s idea, actually. He had called Niles, now in her tenth year with the program, and said Koenig was interested, and that, funny enough, Poole was too. Poole wanted Koenig to get more passing reps, and Koenig simply wanted to play more volleyball.

“We took one look at her playing indoor and knew she had talent,” Niles said.

And knew, soon enough, that she had humility. The parade of Koenig’s apologies had begun.

At first blush, indoor and beach volleyball are practically the same game. Serving, passing, setting, hitting, vision, digging – they all share more similarities than differences. But put an indoor player on the sand for essentially the first time or vice versa, and the nuances don’t take long to appear.

Koenig, brilliant as she was on hardwood, predictably struggled with the all-around nature of the beach game, where she had to pass, set, dive, pull, block one-on-one – all virtually new skills on a different surface with a different ball and a different court dimension, not to mention the mercurial Florida weather. Her block was all over the place as she learned that there’s more to the skill than simply swing blocking. Setting, rarely a skill she had to use in an indoor match, suddenly became something she did often multiple times in a single rally. Offensively, the options were seemingly endless.

And, please, don’t even begin to talk about the decision-making on blocking vs. pulling, lest you want to see a flush of Koenig’s face and some shudders of embarrassment.

It’s still a work in progress. All of it. Which is, among many things, exactly what Koenig loves about beach volleyball.

“I love being able to get better, and with indoor, I’ve been playing since I was eight, so the amount I could get better each year by the time I got to college was way less,” Koenig said. “Blocking? Pulling? All that? It’s more engaging for me. It was all a part of the process and it’s gotten much easier each year too. It was definitely hard, going from indoor where I was more comfortable to beach, which exposed a lot of my vulnerabilities.”

The vulnerabilities are becoming increasingly harder to find.

Koenig is currently 9-2 in 2025 with Alexis Durish, all 11 matches coming on court one. They are the only team to beat LSU’s Parker Bracken and Gabi Bailey and have also logged top-20 wins over Georgia State’s Savannah Ebarb and Destiny White (twice), and Texas’ Chloe Charles and Eva Liisa Kuivonen. She and Durish are the tone-setters of the No. 8 team in the country. All that, and she is only beginning to scratch the surface of her potential.

“What sets her apart is her commitment to her team, and good work ethic along with her God-given talents,” Niles said. “She’s always wanting to improve, never satisfied where she is at yet finds ways to have fun and enjoys the process.”

Much has been made about the youth of this Florida State team. Five freshmen started the season-opener against North Alabama, and four are regularly in the lineup. While Koenig – and Durish as well for that matter – is not a freshman, she will be back in 2026, a core piece of a formidable nucleus returning for FSU.

“It’s been a lot of growth,” Koenig said, and while she was speaking about herself, she could have just as easily been speaking about the team as a whole. “It’s been fun to commit to.”

Swing by a Florida State practice now, and you will not hear many pleas for forgiveness from Koenig, both because there are less errors for which she needs forgiven, and because she understands that making them is an effective way to learn.  

“It’s kind of what you have to do to grow,” she said. “For example, using my hands [when setting] this year is definitely not comfortable. It’s already gotten better, just taking the risks. I got my first double this year, and I was like ‘Hey! My first double!’ If something goes wrong, it’s not like man it went wrong, it’s ‘Why did it go wrong, how can I fix that? Now I know what not to do next time.’ Constantly problem solving and working through.”

The only individuals “stuck” on the court with Koenig, then, are those on the other side of the net.

The days of apologies are long gone.