THE ‘FRISCO FRONTIER: The University of San Francisco sand volleyball team sets up the court for a practice at Ocean Beach. Upper left: Eyal Zimet leads instruction at Piper Park in Larkspur, CA, where USF plays its home matches. (Photos: Jessica Lantz)
they’re used to doing indoors. Fortunately, our players kept a great at- titude and embraced the many challenges that the sand game presents.
FINDING COURTS — THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME Finding a good sand facility has been a big challenge for us. We spent a lot of time driving around San Francisco and the Bay Area looking for sites that could work. We ended up fi nding a good home across the Golden Gate Bridge at Piper Park in Larkspur, where we hosted two home events last season. Though it’s about a 20 minute drive from USF, the time in the van is a good bonding opportunity for our team, and some of the stories that have come out during these van rides are hilarious. The parks department in Larkspur has been great about working with us and accommodating our schedule. We still practice at Ocean Beach (where we use two mobile net kits), and we are looking into potential sites closer to campus that could work as a permanent facility. Our top choice would be to have a lighted sand facility on campus, which would be great for us and a priceless resource for our school in terms of the recreational benefi ts for the student body and the training opportunities it would provide for other sports programs at USF. The
cost of building the courts wouldn’t be outrageous; it’s mostly a mat- ter of getting approval from the administration and having the courts included in the university plan.
RUNNING A SAND PROGRAM — IT’S WORTH THE WORK Our sand program runs in conjunction with our indoor program,
so there’s no separation between the two in terms of scholarships or funding. Coaching both indoor and sand means we are stretched thin in terms of workload, but this is what we love to do and this is the way we can get the sport growing at our university, so we welcome the challenge.
Having a sand program is an added plus when we are recruiting a player for the indoor team, and we now have more players coming to the program with sand experience, which makes the learning process faster. In our program’s fi rst couple years of sand training, we’ve fo- cused on helping our players understand the dynamic of playing with two people on the court and learning the crucial parts of the game; strategy and tactics will come further down the road. Our practices at Ocean Beach help players learn to deal with the wind. One practice in the wind can be worth 10 practices with no wind. It has been very
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