How EASY is the beach game? Part 1

"It must be so hard to play moving around, running and jumping in the sand".  I've heard lots of variations of this over the years, but it's hard to really appreciate just how tough the game is until you see a seasoned vet playing next to a court next of first timers who probably are taking their once a year trip to the beach.  

Mike Dodd tried to explain the difficulty of the beach game in this short promo video for the AVP but what he doesn't say is just how EASY it can become in time.

Ok sure stepping out on the sand for the first time, even if you are an experienced volleyball player is a lot like Bambi walking out onto ice for the first time.  The fact is, that pretty much everywhere you go you are walking on a flat surface, so when you step foot on the beach and the ground beneath you suddenly gives way, your body now has to use muscles it didn't have to before to stabilize itself.

Just about every beach player will go through a stage early in the "preseason" where they have to find their "beach legs".  It is during this time we wonder how we were ever capable of hitting the ball over the net or chase down a roll shot, but after more and more time spent in the sand, and as those stabilizing muscles get stronger the game starts to come naturally to us.

Even to a world class athlete, playing on the sand may seem like playing in a completely alien environment at first, but just like a hangover, it gets better over time.  You can't tell me that the best athletes in the world, with 40 inch verticals, 25+ reps of 225 lb bench press, and 4.4 sec 40 times, would be unable to adapt to these conditions.  Given about a month of pure sand conditioning, footwork, and agility drills you can have Derrick Rose looking like Sean Rosenthal, and Colin Kaepernick looking like more tan version of the "thin beast".

Beach volleyball is probably the easiest tough game there is.  The physical aspect isn't incredibly difficult to adjust to.  Ryan Doherty has show us that already.  But there is another world that most people don't see.  The stuff that goes on behind the scenes, the chatter that takes place between your ears is what really makes this game difficult.  I'll talk more about that in Part 2.