“I knew it would be hard to give up indoor, but my gut feeling was that I should play beach. I’ve wanted to play beach ever since
I was eight years old. I just love it. And that was the deciding factor.” Sara Hughes on switching her focus from indoor to sand volleyball
games are simply better suited to beach than indoor. Nina Matthies, head volleyball and sand volleyball coach at Pepperdine and chair of the NCAA Division I Sand Volley- ball Committee, says she’s optimistic that the number of colleges offering sand volleyball will “take a big leap” next year and could get close to the 40 schools necessary to graduate from emerging sport status to a fully funded NCAA sport with a national championship tournament. Lamberson agrees, project- ing that at least 30 schools will have sand programs next year. She thinks one of the key factors in the sport’s rapid growth will be schools realizing that sand volleyball is a bargain compared to other sports. “There are plenty of examples of pro- grams that are doing it inexpensively, and lots of schools this year are calling other schools (that already have sand programs) to
ask about their budgets,” Lamberson says. “I think when other schools see that it’s a very cheap sport to run, they’ll jump on the bandwagon.” That’s good news for young beach vol- leyball players. The more sand programs, the more scholarships. This year, schools that already have an indoor program are allowed to offer the equivalent of three full sand scholarships – they can be divided among as many as 14 players – and schools with only sand programs can give eight scholarships. Each year, schools with indoor programs will be able to add one extra scholarship until they get to six, which is currently the maxi- mum but could be raised in the future. As NCAA sand volleyball grows, vol- leyball coaches are going to lose recruits to sand volleyball programs. That happened this year to Eric Hammond, the associate head
women’s volleyball coach at University of Maryland-Eastern Shore and a member of the NCAA Division I Sand Volleyball Com- mittee. He was close to signing a talented libero from California, but she got an offer to play sand and turned him down. Even so, he remains a strong advocate of the college sand game, but he says that the potential loss of recruits is a source of worry for some indoor coaches.
“I’ve had conversations with coaches who say that having beach volleyball in col- lege will thin out the talent pool for indoor and hurt the indoor game,” he says. “But proponents of sand volleyball feel it’s great for the general sport, and the whole point is to increase participation opportunities for women. People need to remember that when indoor volleyball was first added as an NCAA sport, women’s basketball coaches objected because they thought it would thin the talent pool for their game.”
Too much rain for Summer H
aving grown up in Southern Califor- nia, Summer Ross knew she’d have to adapt to wet weather when she agreed to play volleyball at the University of Washington, but she figured it would be okay.
“We rarely get rain at home, so I was thinking it would be really exciting,” she said. “But it wasn’t quite what I thought. It was just too much rain.” Too much rain and not enough beach. Ross says she’s happy to have played a sea- son of Pac 12 volleyball and that she learned a lot at UW, but she was disappointed when Washington didn’t add a sand program and disappointed, too, that Huskies women’s vol- leyball coach Jim McLaughlin didn’t allow her to take a short leave from the team in late August and early September to play in the 2011 FIVB Beach Volleyball Junior (U-21) World Championships, an event she won in 2010 with Tara Roenicke. A week after her college volleyball sea- son ended, Ross, who played outside hitter for the Huskies, began looking for transfer opportunities. “I could not just sit up there (in Washington) and watch (sand volleyball) go on without me,” she says. Soon after she decided on Pepperdine. For her, Pepperdine was the whole pack-
SUMMER SWITCH: Summer Ross has made a seamless move from Seattle to Malibu. (Photo: Peter Brouillet)
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