NCAA beach volleyball tournament puts sport in spotlight

Indoor volleyball has produced many future beach volleyball pros, but a change by the NCAA may make it easier for athletes to get their start in the beach game at an earlier age.

The first NCAA beach volleyball national championship will begin Friday in Gulf Shores, Ala., with UAB as the host school. Eight teams will participate in the double-elimination tournament that ends Sunday. Coverage will be shown on truTV, TBS and on NCAA.com beginning Friday.

Todd Rogers, Cal Poly’s head coach and 2008 Olympic gold medalist, said the championship means further validity for the sport.

“It’s just further legitimization that beach volleyball is a legit sport, that there’s tons and tons of interest in it,” he said. “The NCAA wouldn’t have bothered adding it if they didn’t think it would be successful. I’m sure the NCAA did their due diligence on all this stuff, and they said, ‘We need to get this in our fold, because this stuff is blowing up on the Olympics level, and we need to have this for these kids to be able to play.’”

In 2009 beach volleyball was labeled an “emerging sport” by the NCAA. According to the NCAA’s web site, emerging sports must have at least 20 varsity or club teams, data proving the sport’s support and letters from 10 member institutions pledging their commitment to the sport. Beach volleyball has made the jump from emerging sport to NCAA championship-level faster than any other sport.

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Kathy DeBoer, executive director of the American Volleyball Coaches Association, said the addition of an NCAA championship will help promote the game to youth.

“Kids who were interested in beach volleyball didn’t have a choice to go to college and play,” she said. “They went to college and played indoor, and in the summer they would work on their beach volleyball skills. Now there’s a place to develop your skillset while you’re in college, there’s an opportunity to get a scholarship.”

Donald Sun, managing partner of the Association of Volleyball Professionals (AVP), said the NCAA will provide a pipeline between the junior level to the pros and Olympics.

“It used to be you had grassroots amateur tournaments, and you had your professional rank, but you never had that bridge,” he said. “Before you’d play as a junior, and you’d play all the way up to 17 or 18, and then you’d have to decide if you should play recreationally. Now in terms of developing world-class athletes, you have everything from juniors all the way up to the Olympics.”

He said this will allow the AVP and Olympic teams to find the best beach volleyball players more easily.

“There’s going to be a wealth of talent as the beach volleyball NCAA programs become stronger and stronger,” Sun said. “Resources of talent, not only playing in the AVP, but also into the Olympics, is the stepping stone that I think we’ve been lacking for a long time.

“Instead of finding diamonds in the rough like we have with Kerri (Walsh Jennings) and Misty (May-Treanor), people will have programs that are catered to teaching how to compete on a global level. We can have hundreds of Kerris and Mistys because all of these programs are trying to get them prepared to play professionally and globally.”

Nicole Branagh, who competed in the 2008 Olympics, said she started playing beach volleyball after she finished her indoor career in her late 20s. Had this opportunity been around when she was at the University of Minnesota, Branagh, 37, said she would have taken it.

“I think it would have been great, and I think I would have done it,” Branagh said. “It would have been a great opportunity to have then.”

Rogers said the sport is already bigger nationally and expects it will continue to grow. This weekend the AVP Tour will host a tournament in Huntington Beach, Calif.

“In my community of Santa Barbara and greater community of Southern California, beach volleyball was known,” he said. “But outside of Southern California? People rarely played at all.

“Usually you recruit Southern California because that’s where everyone played. But now I’m recruiting literally all over the country. In 25 years, that growth is amazing to me having been involved in the sport for that long.”