HUNTINGTON BEACH — The day before the AVP Huntington Beach Open kicked off, one by one, the league’s Chief Operating Officer Robert Corvino welcomed a slew of competing teams in for a private presentation to sell a new vision for professional volleyball in the United States.
Bullriding. At least, its structure.
Despite the continued growth of beach volleyball as a sport in the United States, the AVP, as league veteran and Long Beach State grad Paul Lotman put it, has long struggled to be profitable. It went bankrupt in 2010. It’s gone through numerous ownership changes. Prize money, largely, has careened. And so, as players across the landscape of the AVP have expressed the need for innovation, Corvino’s vision for its future “just seemed different,” Lotman recalled.
And that vision, as Lotman learned in a 20-minute meeting on Thursday, was, yes, bullriding. In November 2023, the AVP announced the formation of the AVP League, a structure of eight teams based in eight cities across the nation; teams who won at three longtime spots on the AVP Tour, like Huntington Beach, could earn an automatic bid to the league. It’s a format structured nearly exactly, Lotman said, after the Professional Bull Riders’ (PBR) Team Series, which features eight teams hailing from eight cities.
Lotman is 38 years old. Not many reps remain in his knees. He has four children, and runs an Airbnb business, and played with a partner this weekend — Stanford beach volleyball assistant coach Billy Allen — who he’d had all of three training sessions with before Huntington.
He was playing, this weekend, for a love of the game greater than himself. And that meant throwing his weary legs fully into a new idea that has still been only vaguely flushed out, a new idea in a long line of them, an idea he could simply only hope would work.
“I don’t know how many years I have left to play,” Lotman said, after a match Friday afternoon. “But I want to see it succeed, for the future of the sport.”
As some of the best beach volleyball talent in the country has returned to Huntington this weekend for the Open, an annual mainstay on the AVP Tour, they’ve similarly aligned behind Corvino’s plan.
USC alumna April Ross, a reigning gold medalist at Tokyo who made her return to the court on Friday after having a son in the fall, emphasized her excitement at the new format. Tri Bourne and Chaim Schalk had recently thrown in the towel on a year-long push for the Paris Olympics, but came back to compete at Huntington with the goal to continue advancing the game in the States. And Long Beach State alumnus Taylor Crabb, who saw 2020 Olympic dreams chased by a positive COVID-19 test 10 minutes after he hopped off a flight to Tokyo, has since moved his focus away from international play and centered on this new development within the AVP.
For years, the Open was free to all. This weekend, for the first time ever, tickets in the stands overlooking the main court cost money, at $21.60 per day. The stakes have risen, suddenly, around an event that’s been a staple of Huntington Beach for decades: the winners of the men’s and women’s bracket automatically get the first berth in the AVP League.
“The league itself is pushing us, giving us a reason for these tournaments,” Crabb said Saturday, after a win at Huntington with partner Taylor Sander to advance to Sunday’s semifinal in the men’s bracket. “Like, it’s do-or-die.”
“You want to make the league, these tournaments mean a lot. You got to win.”
That’s the simplest way to earn a bid to the league, ultimately. Winners of the Manhattan Beach Open in August and the Chicago Open, from Aug. 30 through Sept. 1, have the same chance. That part is easy enough. Less straightforward is how the rest of the league will be filled out.
Before the season kicks off in the fall, the AVP will hold a player draft in Manhattan Beach, to determine which pairs will represent which cities participating in the league: Los Angeles, San Diego, New York, Brooklyn, Miami, Palm Beach, Dallas and Austin. It’s unclear whether teams drafted will be required to move to those cities, or how an actual connection between pairs and cities will be established.
“The public needs to see you, right?” asked beach volleyball legend Misty May-Treanor in an interview with the Southern California News Group Saturday, expressing she wasn’t sure if “reinventing everything is the right way to go.”
But players strongly advocated that the sport needs a city-team connection, however it’s cemented. Beach volleyball, by nature, had become individualistic, as Lotman said: every team has their own coach, their own sponsors, their own motives. But the AVP needed to generate enough buzz and sell enough tickets to continue justifying the price of constructing their events, Lotman added. And having a city support a team, Lotman felt, was a “sustainable model.”
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The timing, theoretically, aligns perfectly for the league to capitalize off the buzz generated from American teams at the Summer Olympics in Paris. And at Huntington, thus far, the United States’ best and brightest have dazzled.
Reigning Huntington Beach Open champions Sara Hughes and Kelly Cheng, who are headed to Paris, hung tough to beat Hailey Harward and Kylie Deberg 2-1 (19-21, 21-17, 15-6) in the women’s quarterfinal on Saturday. Fellow Olympians-to-be Taryn Kloth and Kristen Nuss, meanwhile, took down Canada’s Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson in three sets (17-21, 21-19, 15-12), and the two United States Olympic teams could well meet in the finals of the women’s bracket Sunday at 2:00 pm.
It’ll set the stage for an exciting final day at Huntington — the winners the first cogs in a grand, and sorely needed, experiment.
“I’m optimistic,” Lotman said. “I hope everyone is, too, because like I said, AVP’s struggled for a long time, and they need to figure out a way to make money and survive.”
