NCAA stage may bring beach volleyball boom
Indoor volleyball has produced many future beach volleyball pros, but a change by the NCAA might make it easier for athletes to get started in the beach game at an earlier age.
The first NCAA beach volleyball national championship starts Friday in Gulf Shores, Ala., with Alabama at Birmingham hosting. Eight teams will participate in the double-elimination tournament that ends Sunday. Coverage will be shown on truTV and TBS and NCAA.com beginning Friday.
Todd Rogers, Cal Poly’s head coach and a 2008 Olympic gold medalist, says a championship further validates 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 says. “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 group’s website, 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 gone from emerging sport to NCAA champion- ship-level faster than any other sport.
Kathy DeBoer, executive director of the American Volleyball Coaches Association, says the addition of an NCAA championship would 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 says. “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 skill set while you’re in college. There’s an opportunity to get a scholarship.”
Donald Sun, managing partner of the Association of Volleyball Professionals (AVP), says the NCAA would provide a pipeline 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 says. “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 recre- ationally. Now in terms of developing world-class athletes, you have everything from juniors all the way up to the Olympics.”
He says this will allow the AVP and Olympic teams to more easily find the best players.
“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,” Sun says. “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, a 2008 Olympian, says 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, says she would have taken it.
“I think it would have been great, and I think I would have done it,” Branagh says. “It would have been a great opportunity to have then.”