NCAA Sand Volleyball Passes Override

Thanks to all of the support from avid beach volleyball players and intelligent coaches, sand volleyball passed the override vote on Jan. 15th 2010 to become a collegiate sport.

Many schools tried to override the decision for greedy reasons of having more money to spread around the indoor program. Indoor coaches fear that the indoor sport will suffer because of how popular sand volleyball will become in a college setting. What sport would people want to watch more than sand volleyball? None! So knowing that sand volleyball will bring in more money for the school in it's first year than indoor volleyball could ever produce makes the indoor coaches nervous.

The fact is that indoor will continue to have it's fans because indoor volleyball for women is in the fall and sand volleyball will be in the spring. This means that fans of volleyball will be able to attend both. Although there are many more people each year that only play sand and never touch an indoor volleyball the fan base for sand volleyball will be greater than that of indoor.

There aren't many sports that are played in college that are not played in high school, so the next question is when will high school sand volleyball start? How are you supposed to train to play collegiate sand volleyball when you don't have anywhere to formally practice?

What is very surprising is the name of the schools that were on the list to override sand volleyball from being a collegiate sport. Most surprising was BYU, who has produced many professional beach volleyball players on the AVP. The fact that they tried to deny this opportunity to future female athletes is very selfish on their part. But now that it passed I wonder if they will adopt the sport where they would have plenty of great players. Most students at BYU come from California and many of them play beach volleyball already. They would not have a difficult time recruiting great beach volleyball players but will they swallow their pride and allow girls to play this great sport at their school?

Collegiate NCAA Sand Volleyball

The NCAA has officially announced that sand volleyball will be the newest collegiate sport. It will not be called beach volleyball because many of the universities will not be near beaches. As for right now the sport is only for women and teams will start in 2010. I've contacted universities about who will be coaching their sand volleyball teams and the answers were unsettling. Most universities said that the current indoor volleyball coach or assistant coach would take on the responsibility of coaching the sand volleyball team. This is the equivalent to a table tennis coach coaching the tennis team. Yes they both have the same word in the name of the sport but they are entirely different. My advice would be that if you want girls to learn proper sand volleyball they need to be coached by a sand volleyball player or coach, not an indoor player that only knows the indoor six on six game. There are plenty of well qualified coaches that have learned the game of sand volleyball and would be willing to coach at a collegiate level. If you are in charge of hiring coaches at a university leave a comment and I can put you in touch with excellent coaches, some that have even played in the AVP. Beach volleyball is growing in popularity more than any other sport in the U.S. right now and having a winning sand volleyball team will bring in more fans than indoor ever will. The game is faster paced and more fun to watch which means it will have a bigger fan base and pull in more money.