The NVL Is Focused To Build Something

I'm sure that at this point the NVL has made it abundantly clear that it will be slow and steady that hopes to win the race.  Just yesterday, I wrote about the lack of a rich talent pool at AVP tournaments, that seemingly feature 2 or 3 main teams that continually advance to Sunday, and there is a definite need to build and develop players at that intermediate stage in their playing career between high school and pro.  

Recently it was released that the NVL will be putting together a beach volleyball academy.  The sound of the name itself strikes me something with the whimsy of Hogwarts with the awesomeness of beach volleyball...but better.  

Sorry Harry, but you're just not pro beach material...NEXT!

This academy will be taking place at Club Med in St. Lucie, Florida and there are plans for 30, that's right three-zero, courts to be built, as well as boarding options.  Before you pack you bags though, be aware that it comes with a hefty price tag:  $43,186 a year with boarding.

It is surely one thing to invest in the juniors programs, and profit off those who are ineligible to collect prize money, but it is another thing to actually develop said players to hopefully one day, stay in the family and play for your tournament to build the sport.  Because it makes no sense to plant the seeds, and water the plants only to have another farmer come along and harvest the crops when they are ready to be picked.  As great as this sounds, there is something that still just doesn't sit right with me.

Parents, you could send your kid to college to party and accrue loads of debt...
Oooor, you could send them here to party, play beach volleyball and accrue loads of debt
Which one gets you more bang for your buck?...That's what I thought. 

I'm guessing the NVL is throwing in the towel on landing a Sean Rosenthal or Brittany Hochevar at one of their events, but at least they have to foresight to land the next Summer Ross when the time comes.  Of course it could all fall apart if they only offer prize money in the form of tuition fee cuts.  The NVL, like any other tour, will have to solve the problem of substantial prize money to draw in the top athletes.  How much of that $43,186 will go toward NVL pro tournaments will be answered down the road, but for now it looks like they are assembling all the pieces into their grand vision.

They have a pipeline to the juniors with USAV, they have been officially sanctioned, they have a crazy expensive resort to be a beach bum, and they've got Mikasa, the ball that no one uses or likes to use.  So yeah it seems to be adding up to something, but I'm not sure if what they are projecting is what I was hoping for them or the sport itself.

As much as the NVL has to work (because the AVP can't be trusted), it just may not work out for them either.  Don't get me wrong, when I first heard of this beach volleyball academy idea, I was ecstatic, and then I saw the price tag.  Growing up I didn't come from money so $2,000-$3,000 a year for club was a lot to me and my family so I can't even imagine who would want to pay 44k for an education at Club Med with volleyball training.

Scenic pictures with obscure filters are a guarantee
in beach volleyball, which is why a youthful mobile app
sponsor would have made more sense

I'm just starting to get the feeling that the NVL is out of touch.  When I saw that they landed a major sponsor recently, and then continue to see that said sponsor is Poloroid, I could only shake my head.  Worse, on their website they describe Poloroid as "the leader in photography".  That's great and all if it is 1974, but here in 2013 the real leader in photography is Instagram.  Besides it would be far more likely for someone to use a camera phone app at a tournament than pulling out a Poloroid.  The digital marketplace is where they can cash in but for some reason they are just taking what they can get.

At this point in the year, we have seen a lot of what both domestic tours wanted to accomplish and we can kind of get a feel for where they are going.  The AVP is still headed to fall off the cliff down the road, where as the NVL is a lot like Forrest Gump.  Ya don't know where he is going, but he is going somewhere, and hopefully when he stops running he doesn't just turn around and instead finds himself at exactly where he (and the group of people following him) wanted to end up.

Hey Forrest...ummm...are we there yet?

A Cut Above The Rest

For the second consecutive tournament the men's final featured Jake Gibb and Casey Patterson squaring off against Sean Rosenthal and Phil Dalhausser, and just like in Cincinnati, Gibb and Patterson took down the 'W' in Atlantic City.  To be honest I wasn't expecting Gibb and Patterson to have this much success this year, for one being a new partnership, and two, having a duo of two bigs playing together (although this is now the 2nd year of Casey playing as a "small").  Still I don't know where to put this hot streak in perspective.  

I don't want to say that low level teams aren't good, or that the top level teams aren't working very hard to get to where they are, but it is clear that there are two different classes of athletes playing in these tournaments.

For all other sports there is a "separation of the classes", a definitive line that states that you are either a part of the elite group of people that are head and shoulders above the rest, or you are just among the commoners working to get close to that line.  Football and basketball has the NCAA,  baseball has the farm system of A, AA, and AAA ball, hockey has the AHL, and even golf has a junior program and pro card that separates the already have's from the want to's.  Beach volleyball, for better of for worse just mixes everyone together and as you can tell there are the familiar faces rising to the top.

After spending 3 years under the tutelage
of Brett Favre, Aaron Rogers is a top 5 QB who
led the league in QB rating last year at 108.0

At what point do you even consider yourself a "professional" in beach volleyball?  Is it when you qualify for a tournament, make the money rounds, or break $20,000 in a year?  For the sport there is a cyclical problem facing many of its aspiring athletes.  In order for them to get better they need more time and money to dedicate themselves to their training but in order to get extra time and money they need to place higher in tournaments.  So as athletes that are working at least one other job they are in fact probably closer to being low-earning amateurs, than "part-time pros".

This is more than just the creme of the crop rising to the top.  This is like putting the creme of the crop in a centrifuge and selecting the most enriched type.  The low-level players are bogged down other jobs, and trying to land sponsors to just make it to the events, while the top-level pros get to train, condition, and practice exclusively for their sport.  Even though every top-level pro has ground it out through qualifiers at some point in their career, there is a better way to develop players.  In NCAA Football, teams have the right to red shirt a player which allows them to be on the team and practice without using up a year of eligibility.  I think that USAV needs to adopt some type of amateur system that allows players to develop effectively by focusing just on the sport and not on the finances and the travel, then as the creme of that crop rises, hopefully we will get to see some new faces on the podium every other tournament instead of every 5 years.

Big Fish In A Not So Small Pond

When news broke of Alex Rodriguez's season and a half suspension handed out by Major League Baseball, there was a echo that billowed throughout the league and a thunderous quake that trembled beneath the players as the verdict was struck down:  the juiced of days of PED use will no longer be tolerated, or swept under the rug.  When commissioner Bud Selig says that the exhibition All-Star game will decide home field advantage in the World Series, he means it, and not much can be done regardless of the amount of push back.  Or when David Stern denies Chris Paul to be traded to the Lakers, fans and players collectively wince as they swallow their pride and move on with their lives.

We may not know all that goes on behind the scenes of some of the major sports in the US, but we get enough exposure to understand how much power players, coaches, manager, owners, and commissioners have when they speak out whether it is through a 2 hour press conference or a 140 character tweet.

Beach volleyball on the other hand is still small enough that the "playing field" is virtually leveled between players and executives.  When they have significant grievances they are heard directly from the owners, not through a proxy, secretary, or assistant.  And when the players push back, there is no army of yes-men at the ready to absorb the backlash from controversial decisions.  So when Tarin Keith, a 7 year mid-level veteran and active social media user, spoke out about various clauses in the AVP's clause and was "banned" from the Manhattan Open this past weekend as a result, LOTS of people heard of it.

More importantly though, her message and growing concern and pessimism in the AVP's vision and business model was reverberated as players and fans prepared to take in "the granddaddy of them all" on this late summer weekend.  The AVP, whether you are aware of it or not, did issue an unofficial "non-specific" rebuttal to Keith's concerns.  But it seems as if the damage had already been done and all the horses have fled the barn.

So where is all of this leading us?  You have players that are more visible, more recognized, and now whose opinions carry as much weight as the owners and person who are supposed to govern over them.  Which means that either the owners of the respective tours, and the executives of USAV either give the players a seat at the table on issues that concern them, or I think the players should seriously consider unionizing so that people like Donald Sun with nothing more than a title aren't able to ban players from valuable tournaments in the future.

How plausible this is I believe will be up to the upper-echelon players, the mainstream and marquee names of the likes of Sean Rosenthal, John Mayer, April Ross, and Brooke Sweat.  Will these players who have worked so hard to get to this level be willing to take a backseat to developing and future players?  They would be in the right to say that it is a "right of passage" that every player must endure, but does it really have to be this way?  To me the beach volleyball players of today hold much more power than I think they realize and are in position to create sustainable career for themselves in this sport, which they rightfully deserve, but who will be willing to take that step forward and speak out, not just for themselves for one another?  

The ground is shrinking beneath the AVP's feet, and no longer can they consider themselves "top dog" when a single email, a single blog post and damage their glossy exterior.  Maybe the pond isn't getting bigger, after all the sport is still rather small domestically.  Instead, perhaps the big fish of the AVP, NVL, and USAV have just been as big as our imaginations allowed them to be.

What's Beef?

The ongoing feud between the NVL and AVP

There is never a dull moment in beach volleyball now a days, and it's all for the wrong reasons.  No, the oo's and ah's are not being shouted from the grand stands, instead people are glaring, cheering, and heckling from behind keyboards.

In this new chapter of the NVL vs. AVP saga, the NVL went on a public "smear" campaign against the AVP to display the lack of transparency, cooperation, and selfish greed that points to a 'not that surprising' unhealthy future for the sport itself.  If you've been following the NVL on Facebook you've seen that they have been posting "updates" on recent communication attempts with the AVP, specifically Donald Sun and Al Lau, to come to a solution over scheduling conflicts as well as contractual obligations that prevent players from playing in any tournament of their choosing.

This is how they prefaced their posts...

Then followed the first update, with update #2 in the comments...

Finally updates 3 and 4 respectively...

As you can see from the comments there is strong support from the fans for this attempt, albeit a flimsy and half-hearted attempt, to repair the riff and scheduling conflicts that have amassed over the past few months.

With the first of two scheduling conflicts coming this very weekend it should be obvious that this is more of a publicity stunt to draw people's attention and favor toward Hermosa Beach this weekend (where the NVL is playing) and not Salt Lake City (where the AVP is playing).  But you have to give the NVL props for using the weapons they have at their disposal:  fan loyalty, a well-respected veteran of the sport (Al-B), and of course the silver bullet:  official backing from USAV.

But as far as I can tell neither side has given any ground in this tug-of-war match for supreme control over the US market.  The AVP has lots of money but the same old model of throwing lots of money at a hat hoping that a rabbit will pop out of it.  The NVL has a healthier grassroots model that puts extra emphasis on youth development, but they are lacking major star power, sponsors, and exposure.  

The end result is ultimately this...

Meanwhile, the fans are left without a winner.  Someone *cough* *cough* USAV *COUGH* needs to clean this up and fast.

Breaking: USAV to sanction all NVL tournaments

So you know when the AVP went through 2 bankruptcies, several tours struggled to make ends meet (and continue to do so), while all chaos breaks loose when tournament schedules conflict, and no one was there to step in?  It seemed like USAV had absolutely no interest in the outdoor game, and was solely dedicated to the youth indoor game as that is where the big bucks are.

But in breaking news it looks like USAV is finally taking a vested interest in the beach game and providing a "safety net" to the NVL, the fast rising, self-proclaimed "grassroots" tour, by sanctioning all of the NVL's tournaments.

The AVP may have money (even though most of it is Donald Sun's), the NVL has now leveled the playing field so to speak with this endorsement.  The rivalry between the two tours and the players that play for the respective tournaments will only get more heated from here.

From a purists stand point, you may only be interested in what is good for the growth of the game, but in the grand scheme of things, when beach volleyball functions within the entertainment industry you must have constant drama to lean on to keep yourself in the spotlight.  All other major sports have versions of this whether it be contract negotiations, free agency, trades, arrests, trash talking, and lockouts.  None of these things are good for the sport but it attracts eyeballs, and more viewers, more followers mean more money.  So for the time being, I'll continue to wring my hands and poke the bear that is this growing rivalry between the AVP and the NVL


Side note: If you think that there isn't much of a rivalry between these two tours then you might want to see who is featured in the AVP's Q&A this month.  It is none other than one of the former poster child's of the NVL Casey Patterson.