TEL AVIV, Israel – Tim Brewster was thousands of miles from his classrooms at UCLA. His seat in his 300-plus-student lectures was empty again, as it had been for the previous two weeks while he was in the Dominican Republic and the Middle East. And yet, while his classmates and peers were in their seats like good students, listening to the professors, taking their notes, studying, Brewster was getting an education of his own, the same unofficial independent study he’d been getting for the previous three years.  
It is one thing to learn about the religions of the world, a class he took with that very name. It is entirely another to stroll the cobblestone streets of Jerusalem, to walk the Via Dolarosa, to see the 14 stations of the cross, to touch the Western Wall, to hear the calls for prayer at the site where Mohammed ascended and descended from heaven.
It is one thing to learn of the poverty of countries like Cuba, and to listen to professors discuss the dangers of men like Fidel Castro. It is another to arrive on your first international beach volleyball trip as a 17-year-old in Havana, and to run out of running water one night, lose power for two, be bereft of functional wifi and any means of communication to the outside world, all the while being subjected to misleading government propaganda. 
No, Tm Brewster may not be in the classroom as much as his professors may like.
But rest assured, he’s getting an education of his own.
“Definitely more valuable than college,” he said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. And he said this, of course, not from a classroom or anywhere close to it. He said it at the kitchen table in an AirBNB in Tel Aviv, where he played in his fifth one-star FIVB of the year, finishing with a career-high fifth. He said it after eating in Old Town Jaffa, after praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, after hearing gunshots ring out from war-torn Jordan as he floated in the Dead Sea.
“I’m going to these places that I’ve learned about in school before, which is awesome. I’m getting the real-world experience of it,” he said. “I’m getting to see these cultures and learn a bunch, especially from the people I’m traveling with, because a lot of people I travel with are older. I wouldn’t miss this stuff for the world.
“I took a religion class last quarter and it was all about Christianity, Judaism and Islam and it’s what we saw today, all day. I’ve never really experienced that. It was crazy.”
Talk with Brewster and, aside from the boyish face and the body that hasn’t quite filled out yet, you would be hard-pressed to pin him as a teenager still finding his way in the world. This season alone, which coincided with his current sophomore year at UCLA, he competed in seven international tournaments. He’s competed against Olympians and AVP champions. He’s been coached by some of the all-time greats. He is 19 yet is surrounded by some of the most elite players and voices in the sport.
“It’s weird because these are guys I’ve looked up to for the last five or six years since I was 14 and playing,” he said. “It’s weird that I’m playing against them now. I’m still not there yet but I can see the progress from where I’ve come from and where I’m heading and it’s pretty exciting. It’s really cool, though, getting to play guys at that high of a level and you get to see the things they do well that you don’t.”
At 19, Brewster is considered precocious by U.S. standards in beach volleyball. Nearly every Olympic Games is a testament to the States’ delayed development system. In 2016, the four United States players – Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena, Jake Gibb and Casey Patterson – were surpassed in age only by one. Of the six players on the top three U.S. teams with a legitimate shot at making the Tokyo Games, four are older than 30, another, Trevor Crabb, is only a few months shy, and the other, Taylor Crabb, is 26.
And yet there is Brewster, alongside his equally young and aspirational peers in John