INGLEWOOD – It was suggested in the runup to this week’s Association of Volleyball Professionals event at Intuit Dome that when Logan Dan visits an AVP venue, he should get the Mariano Rivera treatment.
You know, Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” blasting through the speakers as he walks into the place.
Dan is literally the tour’s Sandman, maybe the most important guy on tour week in and week out. This week he was the guy who oversaw the delivery of 300 tons of sand and its placement into a beach volleyball court in the Clippers’ not-yet-a-year-old arena.
That court, located at the west end of the arena floor, is the centerpiece for L.A.’s stop in the AVP League, a 2-year-old concept involving the eight top teams on the men’s and women’s sides and played in either big city arenas – like Intuit – or in non-beach venues like a tennis center in Palm Beach, Fla., a marina in East Hampton, N.Y., or Central Park in Manhattan, next weekend’s site.
The league format and the non-beach sites have replaced all but two of the traditional beach tournaments on the AVP schedule, both of which are located in Southern California. There are eight league events – five of them indoors – leading up to the championship round at Chicago’s Oak Street Beach on Labor Day weekend.
And not everyone plays every week, which means that if you’re a true beach volleyball fan and you look forward to the sport’s best all in one place, you seldom get that. More on that below.
As the main domestic beach volleyball circuit transitions away from, you know, actual beaches, the guy in charge of the sand becomes ever more important. Dan, a contractor for San Antonio-based Kilowatt Events, is in his second year overseeing the installation of these temporary courts. Preparing the Intuit Dome, he said, was relatively easy, unlike some places – think facilities normally used for tennis – where the sand has to be dumped one place and transferred to another.
“It’s nice to come into a brand new venue and be the first group to bring sand into it,” he said. “Obviously there’s challenges and learning for the venue with us, you know, as we’re bringing in sand and learning the trucks and paths and things. … (But) everything’s already here.”
The sand surface for volleyball, he said, is USGA Top Dressing sand, the same stuff used by golf courses when aerating fairways and greens. Sometimes the sand used for one of these temporary volleyball courts will be given to golf courses or parks or playgrounds.
What do the players think of the temporary indoor conditions?
Kelly Cheng, USC alum and two-time Olympian, said the Intuit sand was “very shallow. We’ve played in indoor venues on the world tour, on the FIVB, and it’s much deeper than this. So, yeah, very springy sand. People are jump serving hard, jumping high. It’s fun. It’s a fast game. It’s different.”
But Cheng, who partners with Molly Shaw for the Miami Mayhem, said she misses the conditions players deal with outside, particularly the wind: “It’s so fun. It makes the game completely different. I love it. … It’s another challenge because you could go out on the beach and some days aren’t windy at all. And you’ve got to find out, find a way to win.”
A dissenting view comes from Logan Webber, who plays with Hagen Smith (son of beach legend Sinjin Smith) for the L.A. Launch. He doesn’t miss those uncertain conditions.
“It’s almost nice for us to just come in knowing that we’re going to have absolutely clean playing conditions,” he said. “Sometimes, you show up at a tournament and you just don’t know what to expect.”
As for the sand?
“This is basically the south side of the Huntington Pier (in) jumpiness,” he said. “That’s very equivalent sand to what this is. If you’re playing in Hermosa Beach? It’s a very different game from this … You sink in, two feet at a time.”
Meanwhile, the question must be asked: Has this new AVP concept, in which four of the eight teams are idle on a given weekend, thrown away the charm of the sport in exchange for regular weekly TV commitments from the CBS Sports Network and the CW?
What used to be a full summer of AVP tournament play has been reduced to only two “Heritage Event” weekends, the Huntington Beach Open in May and the Manhattan Beach Open – can we call it beach volleyball’s grandaddy of ’em all? – which will be held August 15-17. Five other tournaments are “Contender” (qualifying) events; four have already been played in Palm Beach, Fla., Virginia Beach, Va., Denver and Oshkosh, Wis., with one still to come in Laguna Beach Sept. 13-14.
AVP commissioner and chief operating officer Bobby Corvino said Friday the goal “is to continue to partner with iconic venues across this country. We want to grow the sport, and you know how beautiful it looked and incredible it was (at the 2024 Olympics) with Paris and the Eiffel Tower. … We’re strategic about the cities we’re going to right now, but we’re always looking for options and partners that see the vision with what we’re trying to do and build the sport and grow it in that geographic area.”
The fans who showed up at the Intuit Dome were enthusiastic enough, especially when the in-game host fired them up, but the matchups between geographic neighbors Palm Beach and Miami, and L.A. and San Diego, don’t exactly scream rivalry. Dodgers-Padres, this ain’t.
And much of the problem is that the true rivalries in volleyball are between individual teams, and those are deemphasized without the tournament format and the possibility that those teams could play in a Sunday final.
Example: Canadians (and Olympic silver medalists) Brandie Wilkerson and Melissa Humana-Paredes, are on site this week, playing for Palm Beach. Their rivals for No. 1, Americans Taryn Brasher and Kristen Nuss, who play for Austin, aren’t here.
“The idea seems to be that only by making our beloved game into something we don’t particularly like can the AVP attract a larger fanbase,” Mark Davis wrote in April for the “Larry Hamel’s All Volleyball” Substack.
Meanwhile, a poster on the VolleyTalk message board put it this way in a post last August: “Half the 8 teams sit out every week. What’s good about this league? Really what?”
And, a commenter/player on Reddit made this observation last winter: “(The) AVP has decided that it is going to pool its money and resources and shuffle it around the people who are already at the top of the ladder while eliminating the ability for new or growing talent to emerge.”
Did the AVP’s decision makers perhaps miscalculate?
jalexander@scng.com