Flawed AVP League concept low-balls longtime beach fans
Guest commentary: Unlike traditional bracket tournaments, the new team-oriented series didn't give its disenchanted followers enough of the best vs. the best
BY “MARK DAVIS” | For All Volleyball!
Beach volleyball cannot survive as a professional sport in the United States with only the fans it has. We all understand that. What is harder to fathom is why the AVP and its commissioner, Bobby Corvino, seem determined to try to survive without us.
Despite an overwhelmingly negative response from beach volleyball fans to the AVP League’s debut season in 2024, the AVP’s ownership group led by Corvino has doubled down on the League concept. The idea seems to be that only by making our beloved game into something we don’t particularly like can the AVP attract a larger fanbase.
The AVP proposed to do this by implementing a format that integrated the worst features of existing sports leagues into beach volleyball. Before discussing the specific weaknesses of the League, I’ll posit what sports fans want in a product they watch:
We want to see:
The most talented teams …
Competing at the highest level …
For the biggest stakes and …
We want to be able to follow our teams and their rivalries over the course of each season.
What we don’t want is games that don’t matter and teams that are not competitive.
For the sake of comparison, after each complaint, I’ll briefly explain how things were different under the previous structure — which the new AVP calls “Heritage.” (From 1983-2023, the AVP was structured as a series of single- or double-elimination tournaments spread over the spring, summer and fall).
On to the complaining.
In the AVP League, the best teams often don’t play
The best women’s team on the AVP in 2024 was Canada’s Brandie Wilkerson and Melissa Humana-Paredes., the Olympic silver medalists from the Paris Games. Their exciting style of high-risk, high-reward volleyball led to victories in both of the Heritage events they entered last year.
Not only that, their rivalry with Taryn Brasher (formerly Kloth) and Kristen Nuss (TKN) had developed into the most compelling conflict in the domestic women’s game since Nancy Reno and Holly McPeak faced off against Karolyn Kirby and Liz Masakayan.
Fans of the AVP League (if such people exist) were surely anticipating seeing Brandie dominate the net for the Palm Beach Passion. And they saw that, on four out of nine AVP League weekends. The teams that made the Championships played five of nine, but if you were a volleyball fan tuning in, you generally had a 50/50 chance of seeing your favorite team play, whomever that was.
The AVP’s leadership decided the best way forward was to stage events that often did not include their marquee teams. California fans were treated to four events last year, but only got to see the Canadian Olympians play once. Brandie wasn’t hurt, Mel wasn’t attending a friend’s wedding, Corvino inexplicably put together a format that meant Brandie and Mel spent most League weekends home on the couch.
In contrast, Heritage tournaments, when not in conflict with international events, almost always include all of the top American teams.
The best teams don’t play each other
As mentioned, TKN vs. the Canadian pair is the most compelling rivalry the AVP has seen in at least a decade, with those teams splitting 12 matches over the last two years. Add in Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes, the 2024 AVP was blessed with three of the top five teams in the world. These three dominated the AVP and won 11 Elite 16 tournaments on the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour, the last three World Tour Finals, the 2023 World Championships, and an Olympic silver medal.
It seems almost inconceivable that the AVP would not prioritize promoting the rivalries between these teams. But they didn’t. During the AVP League, these exceptional teams played each other once each. Three total matches. No rematches.
If the elusive casual fan happened to stumble across one of these three matches, then followed the League religiously in hopes of seeing more of the same in the next installment, they would have been disappointed. How is that a good idea?
During the last two years of the AVP upper tiers (the Gold and Pro Series in 2023 and Heritage in 2024), the tour had 10 full-field events, seven Pro/Gold in '23 and three Heritage in '24. During those events the top three women’s teams played each other 17 times.
The best teams don’t play for the biggest stakes
The highlight of the League season is meant to be the AVP Championships. This is our payoff for sitting through weeks and weeks of Andy Benesh and Miles Partain blitzing semi-retired 43-year-olds and World Champions taking on teams with career Heritage highs of fifth. This is when the players would compete for the biggest prizes and a place in the sport’s history.
And the League Championships didn’t disappoint. Well they didn’t disappoint me, anyway, since — as with most fans I know — I ignored them. Perhaps Brandie-Mel and TKN did the same, since they didn’t qualify.
Instead we got a matchup between the 3-5 Hailey Hayward and Kylie Deberg and the 4-4 Geena Urango and Toni Rodriguez. I am a longtime fan of Geena’s and Toni and Kylie are two of my favorites among the second tier of AVP up-and-comers, but this match is a below average quarterfinal in a normal Heritage event.
In fact, the three teams that won the last six AVP Heritage events — Brandie-Mel, TKN, and Julia Scoles-Betsi Flint — did not play in the Championships.
The best League ‘teams’ are not teams in any real way
For decades, the Hermosa Open has been one of the AVP’s marquee events. In one of the event’s greatest four-year stretches (1986-1989), Sinjin Smith and Randy Stoklos won twice and Tim Hovland and Mike Dodd won the other two. The teams met in the finals three times in those four years. Going into the 1990 season, the beach volleyball world was waiting for the ultimate rubber match. But it never happened. Why?
Because Mike’s wife, Patty, and her partner, Kirby, lost to Nina Mathies and Elaine Roque in the WPVA’s Fresno Shootout. Wait, what? Of course that didn’t happen, it’s preposterous, makes no sense at all.
Now let’s look at why Wilkerson and Humana-Paredes didn’t play in the League Championships. Because Phil Dalhausser was age 44 and Avery Drost is not very good. Dalhausser-Drost went 1-7 in League play and the Passion, at 6-10, failed to qualify for the four-team postseason. Why didn’t TKN? Because Billy Allen and Paul Lotman were a combined 82 years old. Allen-Lotman had a 3-5 record, which coupled with a 4-4 mark by Brasher-Nuss left the 7-9 Austin Aces out of the top four.
In sports, there is nothing wrong with the inadequacies of a team causing an elite player to not qualify for the biggest events. But the “teams” in the AVP League are not actual teams. The pairs do not work together or affect each other’s play in any way. They are most analogous to NCAA wrestling or swim teams in which separate units compete independently.
In almost every sport that features “team” competition structured this way, the person or unit competing independently is not limited by their “team’s” failures. Kurt Angle won the NCAA heavyweight title competing for Clarion — which is a real university — despite his team’s falling to powerhouse Bloomsburg — also real, I swear — in the Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference.
But the AVP League has no mechanism to reward a pairs such as the Canadians or TKN. Instead, we end up with a final match on the women’s side of Harward-Deberg vs. Urango-Rodriguez.
In Heritage bracket-style tournaments, conversely, teams succeed or fail on their own merits.
A final look
The AVP League fails virtually every criteria sports fans want in a product:
The most talented teams play about half the time and neither …
Compete at the highest level or …
For the biggest stakes. Because of that we can’t …
Follow our teams and their rivalries over the course of each season.
The request
The worst part of the AVP’s persistence with the League is that no real reason exists for sticking with the format. The new owners/managers have done a great thing in securing a new TV contract which should provide regular, mainstream exposure for the sport, including two dates on legacy-network giant CBS. But by sticking with the League, Corvino and Co. have diminished the potential returns from this exposure.
The airtimes secured could just as easily be filled with the last few rounds of a Heritage-structured event in which the matches would mean more, the best teams would play more prominent roles, and fans could better follow storylines. This small change would not only bring back many existing fans, it would show new viewers the excitement we bring to the game, as opposed to the flat, small, lifeless crowds that attended last fall’s League.
Editor’s note: “Mark Davis” (at the writer’s request) is a pseudonym for a longtime fan of beach volleyball, beginning in the 1980s. Mark started off following the AVP and the WPVA, passionately rooting for Randy Stoklos, Liz Masakayan, and Pat Powers and has seen roughly 95% of all AVP finals since 1990. He has stuck with the sport for almost four decades as it changed formats and schedules and slowly reduced the number and quality of competitions, but does not intend to watch the AVP League. Mark says the time he spends pontificating about beach volleyball on social media has increased as his advancing years have limited his ability to play the game.
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