A decade ago it was illegal to play beach volleyball at Toronto's Ashbridge's Bay Park on the shore of Lake Ontario. Today, the flat sandy expanse is home to one of the largest collections of beach volleyball courts in North America, a place where thousands of recreational players and those with Olympic dreams pursue their passion.
Beach volleyball has come a long way and, as the 28th Olympic Games that ended Sunday in Athens demonstrated, the upstart sandbox sport continues to gain in popularity as a sexy spectator event that attracts fans well after the Olympic stage folds. The world tour circuit has a high-energy, party atmosphere that comes with playing hard on a soft beach.
"There's been a real buzz about it at Athens and it was one of the top selling events, with sellouts for the final games," said Matt Bijur, president of CoSport, the company handling Olympic ticket sales in Canada.
And those tickets at the 10,000-seat stadium weren't cheap -- ranging from $85 to $125. (The Canadian men's and women's teams were eliminated in the quarter finals, a disappointment for the men's side particularly, which came away with a bronze medal the first year the game was an Olympic sport in Atlanta in 1996.)
From the beaches of Rio to legendary Bondi Beach (home to the 2000 Sydney Olympic volleyball contests, where the Aussies ruled) to some of the most unlikely places you'd expect to see the beach game in action -- such as Klagenfurt, Austria and Milan, Italy -- volleyball in the sand gets played year-round and devoted supporters follow.
This weekend, Canadian fans can see our Olympic team players in action (and for free), as well as get in some beach time at the Canadian Beach Volleyball National tournament in Wasaga Beach, Ont. Organizers expect about 30,000 people to attend.
As our northern summer winds down, fans of the sport can follow the game south to catch the pros in action or play a game on the beaches in popular winter sun destinations. The beauty of the game is that you don't have to be good to have fun and all it takes is a net, a ball and a few keen players.
Next week, Chicago hosts the first American Volleyball Professionals (AVP) event after the Olympics, where medal-winning teams will compete at North Avenue Beach, a 40-court setting on Lake Michigan. The U.S. pro season continues with tournaments in Las Vegas, Honolulu and Santa Barbara, Calif., this fall. These events bring the party with them. At a July tournament in Hermosa Beach, Calif., the rock group Smash Mouth played a free concert while the pros challenged locals to a game.
The world tour circuit is run by the Federation of International Volleyball (FIVB), with tournaments that began this year in Brazil in March and wind up back in Rio this September on the beaches of Ipanema, where the sport is a religion and the stadium resounds with chanting, drum-beating exuberance.
What's not to like about watching buff bodies in skimpy attire take face plants in the sand? That's what draws Andrej Paulik, 25, from Slovakia to travel to places like Luxemburg to catch the action on the pro beach circuit. "It's a great spectator sport," he said between games in the recreational summer league he's part of while in Toronto this summer.
From its beginnings in Santa Monica, Calif., in the 1920s, beach volleyball has developed into a lifestyle as much as a sport, not unlike that other beach pastime, surfing.
"It's not a hoity-toity sport where they make everyone be quiet while they're playing, like they do in tennis," said Ed Drakich, technical director of the Canadian Volleyball Association. "People come to party and have a great time at beach volleyball. They like to make some noise."
Truth be told, the sport seems to invite some eccentric behaviour, such as Australian star player Natalie Cook's fire-walking routine in Athens where she trod on hot coals to prepare for the 40-degree sandy playing surface.
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