Beach Volleyball Mailbag! Thoughts on the new AVP? Paris predictions?

HERMOSA BEACH, California — The 2023 beach volleyball season was as long as any in recent memory, one that began in Doha, Qatar in January and ended back in Doha just a few weeks ago for the Beach Pro Tour Finals. It criss-crossed continents and hit both new cities and old. New hierarchies were established, new pairs formed. Some worked. Many didn’t.

And yet, in spite of the wealth of information and data accrued from such a lengthy season, the end of the year left us with more questions than answers, particularly with a new AVP system that has many — including most every player — wondering what might be in store for 2024.

Tri Bourne and I did our best to answer as many as we could in our final mailbag episode of SANDCAST. 

What are your Paris 2024 predictions?

• Epic Joy Volleyball

By predictions, we’re assuming our epically joyous friend is referring to who will be on the podium at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. First, a caveat: The Olympics can be a crapshoot of a draw. Take 2016 as an example, when the top two teams in the world were Alison and Bruno and Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena. In an unfortunate twist of fate and awful luck, they met in the quarterfinals in what I still view as the de facto gold medal match. Lucena and Dalhausser lost (14-21, 21-12, 15-9), and Bruno and Alison wound up winning gold.

In the case of the Paris Olympics, however, let’s say the brackets work out perfectly, similar to how the 2023 World Championship bracket did, with Ana Patricia and Duda, Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes, Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth, Mariafe Artacho and Taliqua Clancy — four of the top five seeds — all able to make it to the semifinals with only one minor upset required. Even that upset was just the five beating the four.

Should the universe conspire in such a manner, I have Ana Patricia and Duda taking gold, Kloth and Nuss silver, and Cheng and Hughes bronze, beating either Australia, Germany’s Cinja Tillmann and Svenja Muller, or Melissa Humana-Paredes and Brandie Wilkerson in the quarterfinals. Why Ana Patricia and Duda? They’re the best team in the world, with nine medals in 11 events, and they failed to win gold in both of the 2023 season’s biggest events, settling for silver at World Champs and bronze at the Beach Pro Tour Finals.

You can only keep them from gold for so long.

As for the men, I’m sticking to my guns with the young Swedes, David Ahman and Jonatan Hellvig. I had them winning World Champs this year, and they nearly did it, falling just shy of a Czech Republic team who continues to make a case for one of the most underrated teams of all-time. As a beach volleyball fan, I’m hoping we get a Sweden vs. Norway gold medal match, something we saw three times in 2023, including the Beach Pro Tour Finals, which Sweden won, as they did in Tepic earlier this year. I’d predict the same in Paris.

For bronze, I’m riding with Ondrej Perusic and David Schweiner, the pair voted Team of the Year, with three gold medals, including the massive breakthrough win at the World Championships. Hopefully, the bracket works out in such a way, though it could also go the way of World Champs, where the Czechs played Norway in an unfortunate quarterfinal draw.

For the sport’s sake, let’s hope we get a final featuring two of those three aforementioned teams and, for the USA’s sake, that Andy Benesh and Miles Partain can continue their scintillating 2023 run into an Olympic medal match.

When will the Russians be allowed to compete on the Beach Pro Tour again?

• Joe Meserve

 This is such an intriguing question, as the IOC just announced that Russian and Belarusian athletes will be able to compete at the Paris Olympic Games. The decision came much earlier than expected, by more than three months. But the IOC also provided each sport’s governing body — the FIVB, in the case of beach volleyball — autonomy over how they want to run their sport. Gymnastics, for example, has allowed Russians to compete, and they will do so in blue uniforms. No word has yet been given from Volleyball World or the FIVB, but we could potentially see Olympic silver medalists Viacheslav Krasilnikov and Oleg Stoyanovskiy and their equally talented countrymen Konstantin Semenov and Ilya Leshukov back on the Beach Pro Tour as early as this March, when the 2024 season begins in Doha.

Unfortunately for the Russians — among many unfortunate events for athletes who have been punished for the actions of their government — there won’t be enough events on the calendar to hit the requisite 12 in order to qualify for the Olympic Games. Should they be allowed to compete, their only path to Paris will be through the Continental Cup. It would be a fascinating wrinkle to throw into an already-stacked European Continental Cup, making for must-watch television.

What is going on with the AVP Tour next season?

Additional info on new AVP format?

What do you guys think will be the positives and negatives of the AVP format?

Your thoughts on the recently announced AVP League?

These are just a small sampling of the questions that dominated this mailbag. Well more than half of our 100-plus questions were centered around the AVP, its new ownership, new format, new everything. The simple answer is this:

We don’t know.

Nobody does, probably not even the folks now charged with turning around the perpetually sinking ship that is the AVP.

As for what we think, Riley McKibbin dropped a quote on a recently recorded podcast that has stuck with me: “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.”

Since 2012, the AVP has mostly done the same thing: Host events around the country, build expensive stadiums at most venues, hope the number of eyeballs and fans attracted can command big enough prices for sponsors and advertisers to make the numbers work out, do it again.

It hasn’t worked out. Not in a long time. The losses incurred on an annual basis accrue to no trivial sum. The way the AVP has been functioning virtually since 1994 has been, as evidence would suggest, unsustainable, even in the 2000s, when the top players were eclipsing six figures in prize money. There has, thus, been a long line of owners and those running the Tour with varying degrees of success, from Leonard Armato to Donald Sun to Bally’s to, now, a shared structure in which Bally’s is still a minority stakeholder.

For longer than many of the players have been alive, the AVP has done what it’s always done, and got what it’s always gotten, which is a puddle of red on the bottom line.

So they’re changing. Trying an eight-team league of sorts and limiting the number of traditional tournaments. I’d imagine those tournaments will be watered down, with smaller draws, limited expenses and a minimal stadium setup, if there is one at all.

The history of upstart sports leagues would suggest it will fail. Sports, like most businesses, are a graveyard of hundreds of failed attempts, and what’s left are the behemoths that survived: The NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, and Premier League, among few others. Even those monsters all faced existential crises relatively recently, just as the PGA Tour is now with the rise of LIV. The AVP was actually something of a behemoth once, commanding bigger television audiences than MLB on nights in which they competed.

Those days have been long gone.

What will come of this new AVP? Who knows? Could be good. Could be bad. Could be the change this sport needs or it could fall into the wastebasket of bad ideas.

I’d imagine the landscape will resemble something that looks much like the 2021 season, in which the AVP put on three events and the landmark grassroots tournaments — Seaside, Waupaca, Motherlode, Pottstown — swelled as a result, becoming a haven of the middle-tier player.

The league will, at the very least, be interesting to see how it works and plays out. Competing with the NFL, MLB playoffs, NCAA indoor, and NBA for fall eyeballs certainly won’t be easy, especially since the teams are comprised of just two pairs. I’d be more surprised than not if the league stays a fall season and doesn’t move into the spring in future years, where fewer sports are demanding the attention of viewers. But, again, nobody really knows. The new folks have been intentionally vague about everything, as many of the details are likely still being worked out.

I’ve taken a view akin to that of the parable of the Chinese farmer. If you’re unfamiliar with it, I’ve pasted it below.

“Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, ‘We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.’ The farmer said, ‘Maybe.’ The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, ‘Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!’ The farmer again said, ‘Maybe.’

The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, ‘Oh dear, that’s too bad,’ and the farmer responded, ‘Maybe.’ The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, ‘Isn’t that great!’ Again, he said, ‘Maybe.’”