Beach volleyball is only 2nd to hockey

In the last post I made my argument for why beach volleyball is such a tough sport.  Deep sand, sweltering heat, a mental game that makes chess look like tic-tac-toe, advanced hand-eye coordination and reflexes, in combination with the teamwork, short burst and long-term endurance necessary, I easily put beach volleyball as a top 3 toughest sport, but of course my bias has it in the top 2.  But even that bias isn't strong enough to to allow me to put one sport in particular below it:  hockey.

Let's try to do an apples to apples comparison to see why I will always give the edge to game that is played on the other extreme of temperatures...

1.  Environment
If beach volleyball is on the far right of the playing environment spectrum then hockey is definitely on the far left.  These less than comfortable conditions put additional stress on the body to perform optimally.  Not only that, but basic movements are exacerbated even more so.  For the beach, more resistance is applied to inhibit movement, but ice does the same thing with less friction.  The ice makes it harder to start and stop, so this section is a tie.

2.  Hand-eye coordination
If baseball is at a 10 in this category, then I would place beach volleyball at a solid 6.  Not to be confused with the skill necessary to make certain plays, but purely the making contact on a spike, or being able to intercept the path of a serve or hit, requires advanced reflexes but we don't have to use another instrument to make contact.  We have the luxury to use the familiarity of our own body.  I'm not the biggest hockey fan but clearly there is great skill and coordination necessary to redirect a puck that is flying past multiple players for a goal, not to mention trying to stop it.  The slight edge here goes to hockey.

3.  Athleticism
How you define athleticism will surely be different that how I define it, but we hear it a lot in sports how a player is very raw but has great athletic ability, so what does that say about the athleticism necessary to even participate on the professional level?  Well there are a few factors that we would have to look at:  explosiveness, power, agility, speed, flexibility.  I believe these 5 perfectly encompass the purely physical aspect of playing professional sports.  Reflexes and coordination isn't included because that requires more processing by the brain.

So explosiveness, is generally defined as power exerted over a short period of time.  The most explosive movements for hockey (by my best estimation) is the slap shot.  For beach volleyball you can make the case for either the jumping aspect or the arm swing, but considering that you are facing more resistance jumping through sand opposed to a stick moving through air, volleyball gets the point in this sub-category.

Power in the traditional sense of slow twitch movements, could go either way.  I'm not going to pretend to know what type of training goes into hockey but based on the type of movements made, and the types of builds that you commonly see in hockey I would have to say that the amount of power that either athlete can generate is comparable.

I'll just do agility and speed together because, clearly both are at the high end of the spectrum in terms of agility by having to quickly change direction.  Although hockey does have more room to navigate you won't really get up to a top speed and sustain it long enough for it to be a factor.  The sprinting involved in both sports in more of a product of explosiveness.  This one is a wash as well.

Finally there is flexibility.  For beach volleyball there is the contortion of the back, arm and shoulder during a swing, and for hockey a slap shot has to take place on multiple planes, with great emphasis on the twisting of the core.  Other than that, you do have to get down low a lot on the beach to pass and dig, so if anything there is a slight edge to volleyball in this one too, and over all the athleticism category goes to beach volleyball.

4.  Teamwork
I don't think you can necessarily say that because hockey has more players on the ice at once that a greater amount of teamwork is necessary.  Baseball has more but at any given time, only 2 or 3 player are really involved in the play.  So you can't quantify it in black and white like that.  So I guess what this comes down to is the number of changing variables that each play has to account for and communicate the changes the need to or not be made.  Not only in hockey do you have to take account for being onside, floor spacing, and passing, but there are also line changes going on constantly in hockey.  There is a lot of communication necessary to make adjustments in volleyball but a lot of the time that takes place in between points, and for the most part a simple "mine" call and "high line" or "1 up" call is sufficient to get the job done.  The edge here goes to hockey.

5.  Physicality
This is where the favor swings in big favor to hockey.  For volleyball players our biggest fears is that our body will break down on us, but in hockey you may have to worry about your opponent breaking your body...literally.  When I heard about the injuries that the players played with during the Stanley Cup Final, I was in awe.  The worst of the injuries was Patrice Bergeron who played with a broken rib, torn cartilage in his ribs, a separated shoulder, and later revealed that he had a punctured lung.  But in addition to that Bryan Bickell had a grade 2 knee sprain, Jonathon Toews likely had a concussion, and Marian Hossa clearly was laboring with a bad back.  Getting slammed into the boards, back checked, and slashed by a blunt object surely doesn't make the game any easier.  Point and and mad props to hockey.

As volleyball players, we get to play at the beach, and don't have to worry about getting our bell rung.  For this main reason, no matter what the score is, hockey will forever get my respect.