BEACH VOLLEYBALL: Two-time Olympian Louise Bawden has been playing beach volleyball a long time.
But the sport has taken on a fresh new vibe thanks to the influence of partner Taliqua Clancy.
Bawden was paired with Clancy following her unsuccessful London Olympics campaign with former teammate Becchara Palmer, who decided to retire.
It was perfect timing for 23-year-old Clancy to be plucked from the AIS program in Adelaide and slot in with the established Bawden, who is 11 years her senior.
Since then a blitz of top-four finishes on the FIVB world tour shot the pair up to fifth in the world as recently as last month, before slipping to seventh.
It's well within the top-15 ranking they need to maintain if they are to achieve their goal of a Rio Olympics berth.
They continue their qualification bid this weekend at the Rio test event, where they'll get a taste of the Games' Copacabana beach venue.
Bawden says a big part of the duo's success has been a shared vision that she and Clancy frankly laid out at the start of their relationship.
But Clancy's youthfulness has also provided new perspective for the Victorian, who made her Olympic debut in Sydney 2000 on the indoor volleyball team before switching to the sand variety in 2008.
"It's like breathing a whole new sense of life into what you're doing, and a sense of it being new to me," Bawden told AAP.
"And just that idea that I could really bring my learnings from the past and add them into the team and see how much further we can take it.
"That's been really cool and really motivational for me.
"We meet on the same level with a lot of things. I think she's immature and I'm immature."
Clancy is the first indigenous Australian player to reach this level of the sport, and possesses such skill that Olympic gold medallist Kerri Pottharst recently rated her as the best beach volleyballer she has seen.
"The great thing about T is that she's 23 but she has a lot of strength and courage to set her goals," Bawden said of the Queenslander.
"That's allowed us to come together very quickly and build a team vision, and the standards around what it's going to take to achieve it.
"That's been such a great quality she's been able to bring to the table, and it's given me a lot of confidence going into this cycle that a lot more is possible and that I can grow and I can learn too, even though I'm at quite a different end of my career."
AAP