As the summer of 2011 winds to a close, it is time to take stock of what transpired in what was arguably the strangest summer in recent memory for the sport of beach volleyball in the United States.
Considering where we were on August 13, 2010, when the AVP, the sport’s premier pro tour for over 20 years, suddenly suspended operations, there is no question that some of the events of this summer can be characterized as successes. After the sport imploded and the world economy continued to limp along, things could have gone a lot of ways. That there was beach volleyball to watch in America at all this summer was an enormous feat.
Setting about to re-build a sport from the ground up and make it viable for the first time in its history is not an easy task. Despite the odds and the economic climate, we had several entities in 2011 willing to step in and do just that.
For that you have to credit the sport itself. The people involved in the sport love it and they want to see it continue. Regardless of how fruitless the many past efforts to make it profitable have been, there are still folks brave enough to take it on and to try yet another new strategy in the hopes that the sport itself is not the problem, but instead the way it has been run.
After months of watching the new domestic beach volleyball landscape emerge, it is still unclear if this summer’s model of several tours operating at the same time can work. If there is another AVP-type organization that will once again become the sport’s premier tour, it has not yet materialized as such. So as we look ahead to 2012, here’s a brief overview of what went right and what went wrong.
