hanges in the beach game have helped the sport grow a new breed of players who have fueled worldwide interest by Tom Feuer | Photos by Peter Brouillet
BACK IN 2000, SINJIN SMITH REACHED AN EPIPHANY ABOUT the sport to which his whole adult life was dedicated. “I was speaking with one of the FIVB’s most successful promoters, one who had helped build the World Tour, who thought the game was great, but was contem- plating exiting it because the action under the sideout scoring system was too little and too far between,” Smith said. “This got me thinking that our sport would be less attractive to fans and television alike if we did not make some substantive changes.” What happened next, in one short year of testing and lobbying with the FIVB, served to usher in the modern era of beach volleyball. The court was reduced from nine meters to eight meters square. At the same time, the way the game awarded points changed from sideout to rally scoring. Although to some players and aficionados the alterations were arbitrary, there was some science involved, according to Smith. “We went out to the Sand and Sea club (now the Annenberg Com-
munity Beach House) in Santa Monica and tested both raising the net and making the court smaller. Ruben Acosta (the head of the FIVB at the time) said to pick one or the other and we thought we would get less flak by choosing to shorten the court. We found in our test statistically a noticeable increase in digs and rallies and when we asked players why they did not like the small court they said because it was harder to put the ball down. All of this made it much more exciting and interesting for the public.” While Smith was not a proponent of the scoring change, he under- stood the necessity of trying it especially given that there were significant issues for television broadcasters as beach volleyball, under the sideout system, did not provide the length of time certainty that networks needed to schedule the sport effectively. “The sideout era was ‘grind it out’ volleyball,” said Holly McPeak, who won 72 tournaments overall, 17 of which occurred after the changes were implemented. “With the new rules the teams that make the fewest errors tend to win. In the sideout era you could take more chances, because you could not lose a point on your serve. At the beginning (of the rule changes) teams were a lot less aggressive on their serves because they did not want to give the other team a point.” Smith thinks that was ultimately good for the game. “Seeing a bunch of aces being served makes for less rallies, which makes the game less engaging for the fan and viewer.”
Whether due to the rule changes or not, the millennium ushered in
a new era characterized by the following additional developments.
Continental divide
The new century marked a shift in the axis of global domination. No longer were Brazil and the United States the only countries to have reasonable expectations of winning medals on the World Tour. A number of European countries were devel- oping strong programs, and at the forefront were Switzerland, Germany and Norway. Among the most skillful and entertain- ing teams was the Swiss family Laciga. The two brothers, Martin and Paul, would often argue on the court and give each other the silent treatment, but they were pioneers, as the first European team to consistently place high on the fully loaded FIVB World
Tour (Bjorn Maaseide and Jan Kvalheim of Norway picked up seven wins in the mid-1990s, but the tour at that time was absent 90 percent of the top American players). The Lacigas’ big breakthrough was at the 1999 World Championships in Marseille, France, when they battled the field, along with the gale force Mistral winds, to earn the silver medal sandwiched between two very strong Brazil- ian teams, gold medalists Jose Loiola and Emanuel Rego and former World Champions and bronze medalists Rogerio (Para) Ferreira and Guilherme Marques.
The Lacigas remained
a force throughout the first decade of this century, although they eventually split apart. In 2005 elder brother Paul won the silver medal with Sascha Heyer at the Worlds. While in the 2008 Beijing Olympics Games, Martin paired up with Jan Schnider and in the single elimination round of 16 had even- tual gold medalists Phil Dalhausser and Todd Rogers down 6-0 in the third set to 15 before the Americans righted the ship. It was a German team, Axel Hager and Jorg Ahmann, that won the
Germans Alex Hager and Jorg Ahmann broke the medal ice for Europe when they won bronze in Sydney in 2000.
first European medal at an Olympic Games, garnering bronze in Sydney in 2000. However, the European player who may have had the greatest impact on beach volleyball in the first 15 years of the 21st century was a countryman, Julius Brink. Only 6-1, Brink was one of the top servers in the sport with both a wicked jumper and a no-topspin floaty, each of which wreaked havoc upon opponents. Brink won bronze with Kjell Schneider at the 2005 World Cham- pionships, and then seven years later paired with Jonas Reckermann to become the first team from a country outside of Brazil and the United States to win an Olympic gold medal. On the women’s side the shift was less pro-
nounced. Brazil and the United States together have won 11 of the 15 medals since beach vol- leyball gained full Olympic status in 1996. Since 1997, 24 of the 28 World Championship medals have been won by the beach heavyweights. That being said, multiple teams from Germany, the Netherlands and Canada have made recent in- roads on the FIVB tour.
The five-tool player
At six-foot-four, Randy Stoklos would be an undersized “big man” in today’s game of seven-footers.
In the 1980s and 1990s Randy Stoklos stood out. As a 6-4 behemoth-of–the-time, he could do it all: picture perfect hand sets, superb stuffing, including the one handed “kong” block, as well as passing and hitting adeptly. A fierce jump serve
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