SANDCAST Mailbag: Taking all questions about the new-look AVP Tour

HERMOSA BEACH, California — The 2024 AVP schedule was not intended to be announced as it was last week:

Accidentally posted on their own website and shared by a slew of fans and various beach volleyball groups on Facebook before it was taken down from the website. But the cat was out of the bag, pandora out of its box, and, in a few hours, the schedule was back on the website.

Not the intended launch, no, but, intent notwithstanding, that is, for better or worse, what happened, which is exactly how the Sand Wannabes, an Austin-based beach volleyball crew, put it when they became one of the earlier groups to share the post on social media.

“It’s here,” the moderator wrote, “for better or worse.”

Here, then, is the final schedule:

A limited, six-stop season that is considered by most to be a three-stop season, with major events, renamed “Heritage Series,” in Huntington Beach (May 17-19), Manhattan Beach (August 16-18), and Chicago (August 30-September 1), with minor, qualifying events, now called Contenders, in Denver (July 6-7), Waupaca (July 13-14), and Virginia Beach (August 3-4). Those six events precede the onset of the new AVP League, an eight-week duel-style format which remains a touch vague, as details are still coming. With many details still to come, we received no shortage of questions about the AVP, the 2024 beach volleyball season, and our thoughts on it for this week’s episode of SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. We did the best we could to answer the questions with what limited information we have, and are privy to share.

Biggest AVP Tour snubs? League snubs?

Before we get to any snubs, I want to acknowledge what I believe the AVP got right. It kept Huntington Beach, long one of the Tour’s most popular stops, on the schedule, as well as Chicago, which has a deep and rich history, as well as one of the best crowds in the country — easily the best outside Southern California. The Atlanta-based fans will no doubt feel snubbed, but until Atlanta is able to get the crowds of a Huntington, Manhattan, or Chicago, they can’t reasonably argue that the AVP should have returned to an expensive venue that was rarely more than half full.

Snubbed, to me, is Hermosa Beach, which I — a Hermosa resident, for transparency’s sake — put as the current leader for greatest beach volleyball town in the world. There are no beach volleyball fans like South Bay beach volleyball fans. Hermosa Beach is where a large percentage of the professionals live, and where nearly all of them train on a daily basis. The crowds are wonderful, the atmosphere electric, and the event is so alluring that many teams will skip the most prized international event of the year — the Gstaad Elite16 — to stay home, a rarity, especially in an Olympic qualifying year. Alas, for a variety of reasons that are likely complex and logistical — not to mention financial — nightmares, Hermosa is not on the 2024 schedule.

For the League snub, I think New Orleans, with its impassioned fanbase and tremendous culture and zeal for the sport, is the biggest candidate. It’s always a risk going to New Orleans, with its finnicky weather that once truncated qualifier matches to sets of 11, 11, and 7, made for the sloppiest of finals in 2015 and 2016, sent Wilson into a powerline and ruined quite a bit of equipment in 2023. But four night matches? With a bar with cheap and strong drinks next to the courts? Near the home of the No. 2 team in the world in Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth? The community that raised Evan Cory into one of the most exciting players on the AVP? A League stop would be positively wild at Coconut Beach, and much more manageable to work around the weather given its limited size. I understand why the AVP might not want to roll the dice on New Orleans, especially after last year’s pop-up, mildly apocalyptic hurricane, but it sure would be fun to have a League stop there.

How will qualifying for events be different this year?

Qualifying isn’t all that different from 2023. Huntington Beach and Manhattan Beach will both have on-site qualifiers, which is how it was in 2023. The top four finishing teams in the Denver and Waupaca Contenders will punch their tickets to Manhattan Beach as well, and the top four finishers in Virginia Beach will qualify for Chicago.

As for the AVP League, there are three different ways one can qualify: Win a Heritage Series (Huntington, Manhattan, Chicago), accumulate enough points via your top two Heritage finishes of the year, or make a convincing enough case for the AVP to grant you a wild card. How the wild cards are decided, and who decides them, is one of the details that remain vague, but given the overall lack of wild cards doled out in normal tournaments of year’s past, I’d expect the eight League slots to be filled by Heritage winners and point-earners.

What is a young gun team that could take a big leap this year?  

Teams are rare for young players, as any talented young player’s main goal is to prove themselves worthy of a partner upgrade, especially as an Olympic quad comes to its end and there will be inevitable mid-season partner shakeups. So rather than highlighting young gun teams, I’ll point out a few younger players, or middle-aged ones who have not yet been established, as my stocks to buy this year.

Evan Cory: The 26-year-old has had both his brilliant rookie season and something of a sophomore slump. Now in his third year as a professional, I’m expecting Cory to find his feet again and continue the upward trajectory he was on in 2022.

Wyatt Harrison: Harrison made three main draws in 2023 in three different manners: New Orleans split-blocking with Noah Dyer, Hermosa Beach blocking for Jake Landel, Manhattan Beach defending for Cash Adamsen. Where some might see “tweener,” I just see an excellent volleyball player. True to form, he’s beginning this year split-blocking with Cory in a NORCECA qualifier next Thursday. Whether he winds up blocking, defending, or splitting throughout the year is anyone’s guess, but he has the ability to play with the best player available.

Jordan Hoppe: It’s surprising that Hoppe only made one Pro or Gold Series main draw last year, and that came in the opening event of the season in Miami. He has a wicked serve, with tremendous pace and excellent location, and offensively he’s physical, with range off the net and sweet hands for whomever his partner is. To begin the year, that partner is James Shaw, back on the beach after spending last year competing in Germany.

Zephyr Dew: If you want a young young gun, Dew is it. He’s just 18 years old, a Santa Cruz beach rat who plays in every CBVA and little tournament you can find. Scott Davenport and the USA National Team Developmental Program were wise to get Dew into the mix. He has a live arm and reads the game well for such a young age, and, my personal favorite quality, he’s spunky and fiery, not afraid to play with a little emotion, something I think our sport needs.

Dave Wieczorek: Not technically a “young gun,” Wieczorek is young in beach years. Last season, after an indoors career in which he competed in Germany, Turkey and Greece, was his first on the sand, and he logged wins over Ed Ratledge and JM Plummer, Hagen Smith and Logan Webber, and Troy Field and Lila Tucker. With a full fall and winter of off-season of reps with the USA program, the 6-foot-8 blocker will still be raw, but immeasurably more polished than he was in 2023.

Alaina Chacon: How one is supposed to select a handful of women to watch is an impossible task, for all of the right reasons, but it would be difficult to miss Alaina Chacon. The first time I saw Chacon play, she was split-blocking on court one at Florida State with Molly McBain, dominating with a gritty, small-ball style that Brooke Niles loved. McBain is now legitimately in the mix of the Olympic race after getting picked up by Sarah Pavan, and Chacon has a Tour Series win to her name and took a seventh in Manhattan Beach, both with Kylie Deberg. She’s currently signed up for a host of Futures with Mariah Whalen, another outstanding athlete.

Sarah Wood: If this were an actual stock to buy, I’d consider betting on Sarah Wood at this moment in her career to be the rough equivalent of buying Apple at $22 on its IPO. She’s just 15 years old, so part of me feels weird putting any hype or pressure on the Pennsylvania native, but she’s made six Tour Series main draws and one Pro Series, in Hermosa Beach last year. It’s hard to ignore that success at such a young age.

Chloe Loreen, Natalie Robinson: I’m lumping these two together because all that I’ve seen from Loreen and Robinson is when they are together. And when they are together, it’s a potent combo. While most beach volleyball fans won’t follow Tour Series events closely, it was no small event when these two made the finals of the Waupaca Tour Series, winning five straight matches to do so. Impressive as that was, they put the AVP world on notice when they stunned Betsi Flint and Julia Scoles in the first round of the Manhattan Beach Open, then proved it was no fluke by sweeping Macy Jerger and Megan Rice and pushing Zana Muno and Deahna Kraft, and Brook Bauer and Megan J. Rice in the following two rounds. While it was a surprise, when reviewing their collegiate success at Washington, it really shouldn’t have been: In helping Derek Olson turn the program around, they became the program’s first All-Americans in school history, and Robinson is the all-time wins leader (95) while Loreen is No. 2 (92).