Bringing back beach volleyball to Riverside - Press-Enterprise

Jim Alexander

10:00 PM PDT on Saturday, August 27, 2011

BY JIM ALEXANDER
STAFF WRITER
jalexander@pe.com

MANHATTAN BEACH - Remember April of 2009, Riversiders? Remember how much fun it was to have pro beach volleyball's best cavorting in that temporary sand pit behind the Convention Center?

And remember how, in the wake of the AVP Tour's demise last August, it seemed forever doomed to be a one-shot deal?

Believe it or not, it might not be.

"Riverside, to me, should always be on our radar," said Dave Williams, who was on site for that event as an AVP operations guy and now is the managing director of beach programs for USA Volleyball.

Why is this pertinent? Because this weekend we may be seeing the first stirrings of the rejuvenation of professional beach volleyball.

The sport itself never went away. But with the marketing muscle of IMG and the money of Jose Cuervo tequila, the concept of a domestic pro circuit again seems real, with this weekend's 51st edition of the Manhattan Beach Open serving as the symbolic re-launch.

"The players I've talked to so far have been like, 'This is awesome. It feels like we're back,' " said Sean Scott, who along with John Hyden came in as the No. 1 seed in this double-elimination tournament and the third-ranked team in USA Volleyball's rankings.

It feels big time, even if nobody named Dalhausser or Rogers, or Misti or Kerry, is on the entry sheet. Versus is on hand to televise Sunday's final, and the sponsors' village, while comparatively small, has been wildly popular.

(Young women in bikinis, of course, are generally helpful in that regard.)

The Cuervo/IMG combination is staging three tournaments this year, following up Manhattan Beach with events in Miami and Hermosa Beach in September. IMG senior vice president James Leitz said the idea is to add three or four more events in 2012 -- Chicago, the New York area, maybe Atlanta or Phoenix or somewhere in Texas -- and grow from there.

"Our goal is to make this the big, televised, top-tier, big-prize-money series," he said.

Another AVP, in other words, only without the bloated, top-heavy administrative structure that, when buffeted by a weak economy, ultimately helped along that organization's collapse.

"Events make money," Williams said. "Tours lose money. We had so much money in the overhead of the administration of the tour, we couldn't tell which events made money and which ones lost money."

Leitz has a strong background in so-called "action" or "lifestyle" sports. For example, he runs the U.S. Open of Surfing, which takes over Huntington Beach for a week every July.

He talked about how the marketing approach to those events was driven by the original beach volleyball model: the grandstands, the music, the influence of the beach lifestyle and SoCal cool. Ironic, then, that he's now charged with revamping that model.

"I want people to come down here and say, 'There's my volleyball' -- not AVP's volleyball, not USAV's volleyball, not IMG's volleyball," he said. "We've got to get those people excited again. We've got to get the industry vital again."

Williams suggested the next pro circuit should probably be similar to the golf or tennis tours, with individual promoters in various cities taking a greater role in running tournaments.

"If I can find a promoter in San Francisco who wants to share risk with us and IMG, we're going to come out," he said. "We could easily have an event in San Francisco sanctioned by USA Volleyball and produced by the San Francisco Giants, and they could bring their own sponsor."

And, he added, the Giants helped produce an AVP event in the Bay Area five years ago. The NBA's Miami Heat and New Jersey Nets have done the same.

So maybe that's the entrée for Riverside and the Inland region. Are folks at, say, Auto Club Speedway or the Ontario Reign paying attention?

Riverside, so risk-averse for so long, has already proven it can pull this off. It got its first chance, remember, thanks to City Councilman Rusty Bailey's friendship with former West Point classmate Jason Hodell, then the AVP's CEO.

"We had one weekend and we had two" choices, Williams said, recalling that a site in San Diego was also in the mix. "Jason kept saying, 'Oh, you gotta go out to Riverside and talk to Rusty.' I was saying, 'You gotta be kidding me. Forget it. I'm not going.'

"They made me drive out there. I met with Rusty for half a day, and in the car on the way home I called (commissioner) Leonard Armato and I said, 'We're going to Riverside' ... It was a great site, a great event, and easy people to work with.

"Riverside would be a great market for us."

We'll be patient. But we're holding him to that.

Reach Jim Alexander at 951-368-9543 or jalexander@PE.com

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