NOTEBOOK
Coming to a campus near you: sand volleyball C
ollegiate women’s sand volleyball is primed and ready to launch in Febru- ary of 2012. Somewhere between 16 and 19 universities are expected to fi eld teams for the inaugural season. In its fi rst year as an emerging sport, sand volleyball – yes, that’s the same thing as beach volleyball, just with a more inclusive name – will likely have six West Coast teams and another 10 to 13 teams in the southeastern part of the U.S., says University of Central Florida Women’s Coach Todd Dagenais, chair of the American Volleyball Coaches Associa- tion Sand Volleyball Sub-committee. High-profi le indoor women’s volleyball programs like Southern California, UCLA and Florida State are expected to fi eld teams next spring.
“Those are the areas where it’s going to grow from,” Dagenais says. “Hopefully, the West Coast will spread north and east and the East Coast will spread up to the (Eastern) seaboard and we’ll meet somewhere in Texas and it will grow in the plain states.” Details are still being worked out for how
the fi rst season will unfold, but here’s what we’re likely to see: • There will be a mandatory eight “play dates” for each team, three of which will be dual matches.
• For a dual match, two schools playing will each seed fi ve doubles teams; No. 1 will play No. 1, No. 2 will play No. 2, etc. The school that wins a majority of the fi ve matches will earn the victory. (The format for this, Dagenais says, is very similar to NCAA tennis matches.) • The sand season will run from Febru-
ary through April, but schools will be able to schedule matches at their discretion, so it would be possible for a team to complete its minimum standard in a month. • A championship tournament is being planned for early May that would coincide with the NCAA men’s indoor championship. For that tournament, four to eight schools will be given at-large berths – the teams will be selected by a committee – and they will compete in both a dual-match format to determine a team champion and an individual format. In individual pairs play, fi ve doubles teams from each school will be seeded into a single-elimination bracket and slug it out for a national title. • The preference, Dagenais says, is to hold the college beach championships at an on-campus site, which he says will encourage
14 | VOLLEYBALLUSA
COLLEGE SPIRIT: Players from schools like the University of San Diego, above, and Pepperdine will be able to battle on the sand for an NCAA in the near future. (Photos: Peter Brouillet & Brian White).
local interest and take advantage of school resources and existing sponsorships. The ultimate goal for collegiate sand vol- leyball is to reach 40 programs, the minimum number required for a sport to hold an offi cial NCAA sponsored national championship. In the meantime, the focus will be on get- ting a season in the books and shaping future seasons based on what is learned in 2012. Dagenais says he expects collegiate sand vol- leyball to evolve and change dramatically over the next couple of years. But as that happens, many young volleyball players who might not be suited for the college indoor game will have new opportunities.
“This opens the door for the 5-9, 5-10 outside hitter who doesn’t get a scholarship as a libero and is asked to walk on as an outside hitter,” Dagenais says. “The indoor game is getting bigger and more physical, and a lot of the scholarship money is wrapped up in the big, tall athletes. The sand game attracts a dif- ferent kind of player and gives them the same opportunity to go to college on a scholarship that the big kids have.”
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