Mason Briggs: The trailblazing libero who amassed a 100K-plus following

HERMOSA BEACH, California — The foundation of Mason Briggs’ entrepreneurial spirit, the one that has helped him amass nearly 130,000 followers on Instagram and is turning the libero position — libero! — into something resembling cool, began like any young entrepreneur’s might.

With duct tape wallets.

“I got really into it,” the Long Beach State senior said. “I actually bought a cutting board. A lot of people use scissors but I used a cutting board so it’s clean, precise, same cut every time.”

It was a precocious display of remarkable attention to detail for an elementary school kid. His grandfather, who was in the shoe business, thought it whimsical but adorable enough, a perfect conversation starter, to bring as a gift to a shoe convention. When his grandmother pulled out a cheetah print wallet at the convention, it caught the eye of a buyer at Steve Madden.

They ordered 200.

“I’m handmaking them every day, can’t even go outside,” Briggs said, laughing. “That was my first big thing I actually profited from.”

But as Briggs developed as a volleyball player, training with the USA Volleyball youth team indoors, winning tournaments on the beach outdoors, his ability to intertwine his abilities on the court with his natural knack for business became limited. The landmark decision for athletes to capitalize on their name, image, and likeness was still years down the road. Even though his social media accounts were growing at a steady rate, “I didn’t really get it,” he said. “I was like ‘Why? Who cares?’ And I guess that’s still the question: Who cares?”

He both did and didn’t get it. When he was training with the USA High Performance group, he’d post videos from his days, mostly for those who were curious what he was up to. In targeting a specific audience, he happened to hit a wider one.

“I guess it turned out to be a lot of people,” he said.

The who cares question was answered. The next: What’s the point?

Likes and comments, shares and engagement, aren’t good for much when you’re a high school or college kid, aside from a rush of dopamine and clout. Unless he were to parlay his platform into private coaching on the side, it wasn’t exactly a lucrative side hustle. Even then, he could still get in trouble.

Until, that is, July of 2021.

When the NIL decision was made, suddenly athletes could (legally) make money on their own. They could attract individual sponsors, sell merchandise, advertise on social media, charge for autographs and various other memorabilia that would have previously made them ineligible. While the major revenue sports — football and basketball, namely — hauled in millions, and collectives popped up all over the country as financial recruiting arms for schools, men’s volleyball, of course, remained far out of the spotlight. There are just 26 men’s Division I programs, with only 4.5 scholarships to divvy up across an entire team. Even with his six-figure following, Briggs only landed one minor NIL deal, with Naples Rib Company in Long Beach.

Just as he did with his duct tape business, he’d have to get creative.

No problem.

One of the many benefits of playing for Long Beach is its tradition as one of the best programs in the country, with a loyal fanbase that routinely packs the Pyramid. After matches, Briggs would be asked, on a regular basis, to sign autographs. On anything. One kid asked him to sign a piece of scrap paper. Another requested his ticket. One even pulled off his shoe for Briggs to autograph. It was that last one that did it.

A shoe?

There had to be something better than a shoe.

“I’m like ‘What can we do?’ Trading cards!” Briggs said. “Why not in the sport of volleyball? I’ve had the idea for more than a year now. The idea behind it is to build a volleyball trading card company. We do need bigger players, we need bigger personalities, and we also need to keep it volleyball, at least at the start. If we can build this from the ground up and see what the fans and the people make of it.”

Mason Briggs in his own merch and trading cards/Mason Briggs photo

A zero sum game, this is not. Where the NIL landscape can often be cutthroat and competitive in its race for sponsors and money and what the collectives can then, in turn, offer prospective athletes, Briggs has used it to amass one of the biggest platforms in all of college volleyball. That has directly led to more fans at Long Beach State matches — more eyes on the sport, more revenue in ticket sales, more popcorn being sold at the concessions stand, more intimate connections.

“You start to hear from them and these crazy stories that these people drove six hours to see you play or you inspired them a little bit or you connected with them on some little bit, something like faith or they’re a libero,” Briggs said. “That’s where it fueled me. I’m trying to build up my personal brand but really what’s behind it is the sport of volleyball. We’re all in it together, especially men’s volleyball. It’s really cool to see what women’s volleyball is doing, especially in the indoor space. Hopefully men’s can follow suit.

“I just hear people say ‘Grow the game grow the game grow the game’ but for me it’s ‘What is that? How?’ That’s where these ideas came from. I’ve always been entrepreneurial and business-oriented. It really came from growing the game and these questions that came about.”

Like others blazing a similar path in the sport — Joe and Gage Worsley come to mind, with their Out of System brand — Briggs has his priorities straight: He is a player first, brand second. Anyone who receives one of his trading cards can take a skim of the simple but aesthetic resume on the back and know that, yes, he is one of the best liberos on the planet, an All-American and winner of the Erik Shoji Award. It’s why USA National Team coach John Speraw carried Briggs as the only NCAA athlete on the World Championship roster, something Briggs calls “a pinnacle moment.”

“I called my parents, crying, on FaceTime,” he recalled. “The World Championships was crazy because I went to a NORCECA with the B team. The A team was training and then traveling. We had just finished and I got a call saying ‘Hey, want to come to World Champs?’ I was like what? I went from 10 days in Canada straight to training with them for World Champs. I was gone for five-and-a-half weeks. Started training in Italy, played a couple exhibition matches, it was me and Erik.”

Ah, yes. Erik Shoji. Arguably the best libero who has ever donned a USA jersey, and currently one of the best in the world at his position. There is no supplanting Shoji, just as there is no supplanting Micah Christenson at setter, no matter how talented his backup may be — and, indeed, Micah Ma’a is a supremely talented backup.

“[Shoji] has been maybe the best that’s ever played for the United States, but he’s also getting to the point in his career where I think they’ll probably be some conversations about whether he’ll continue to L.A.,” Speraw told the Los Angeles Times this past May. “If so, who the next person will be is up for debate, it’ll be a competition and I think Mason is in that mix. … He has the potential though, 100 percent.”

It is the paradoxical nature of the position: While replacing an Erik Shoji is a near-impossible task, who better to learn from than one of the greats? At 34, Shoji has 12 years on the 22-year-old Briggs, an age gap that helps make the positional rivalry more a magnanimous relationship than competitive. Shoji offers advice where he can, and teases when Briggs suits up against Hawai’i, where Shoji was raised and where his father, Dave, was the longtime coach and a living legend.

“We even talk every month,” Briggs said. “It’s cool to learn from him.”

Off the court, too, Shoji is a maverick, boasting more than a quarter million followers on Instagram. While he isn’t relying on selling trading cards and clinics for his paychecks — his current club, Grupa Azoty ZAKSA Kędzierzyn-Koźle, in Poland, pays just fine — his platform has drawn additional eyes to the sport, and one of the most unique positions in it. It’s a role Briggs is continuing to fill and expand.

“People have started coming up to me and saying ‘Hey, I want to be a libero!’ I never heard that or thought about that,” Briggs said. “People said ‘Hey I switched to libero because of you.’ What? It’s a cool place that I’m in and why I’m trying to do all this stuff is because I can carry this from what I’m doing now with the college stuff into the professional scene. Right now I’m doing clinics and transitioning that even soon to an online thing. Not that I won’t do in person but having both. I can only do one or two private lessons but I can do a clinic and reach more people or an online Q&A. Things like that that I can transition into the pro space and one of those would be the online sessions or mentorship and then continuing merch and stuff.”

He’s spreading a wide canvas. Something will stick, be it the trading cards or the clinics or various collaborations or, perhaps most likely, something he hasn’t even thought of yet.

“I have a lot going on,” he said, smiling. “Even as I’m driving up I’m remembering I have a lot going on.”

So, too, hopefully, will the sport.

Mason Briggs signs autographs after a match/Long Beach State photo

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