We also run beach volleyball classes, private lessons and training camps for adults and juniors in Hermosa Beach, CA and Salt Lake City, Utah. We run volleyball vacations in exotic locations around the world. We can even run beach volleyball clinics for your group, club or team in your hometown! Send an email to [email protected]

Why is speed so important to a beach volleyball player?

Speed, in some way, shape, or form, is crucial to almost every sport and beach volleyball is no different. There are different types of speed. Gymnasts need to have speed to perform multiple flips. Baseball players need straightaway speed to pursue a fly ball or get to first. Most volleyball training programs neglect to incorporate speed exercises in their workouts and that is a huge mistake!

Meanwhile, our 60 day strength and conditioning program, tailored specifically for beach volleyball players, covers everything you need to know to jump higher, hit...

We also run beach volleyball classes, private lessons and training camps for adults and juniors in Hermosa Beach, CA and Salt Lake City, Utah. We run volleyball vacations in exotic locations around the world. We can even run beach volleyball clinics for your group, club or team in your hometown! Send an email to [email protected]

Beach volleyball conditioning requirements are unique. Unlike a lot of athletes, beach volleyball players have to train to compete in tournaments, which means we need to be able to turn the engines on and off multiple times in a day.

At the pro level, you max out at four matches in a day. Ninety percent of matches last  from 30 to 64 minutes on the FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour. AVP matches tend to be a bit longer due to less stringent rules on time taken between points. Matches in amateur tournaments, like those run by the CBVA or AVP America, can be shorter but they also tend to go much longer. This...

One of the greatest plays I’ve seen in beach volleyball is also one that maybe only 50 other people were able to see live. I sat in the mostly-vacant bleachers at the FIVB’s event in Las Vegas, which was being put on and promoted by p1440.

On the court in front of me was my good bud, Tri Bourne, who was playing with Trevor Crabb for the bronze medal against Russia’s Viacheslav Krasilnikov and Oleg Stoyanovskiy. Bourne and Crabb were up 16-15 in the third set.

Earn one more point and the bronze medal was theirs. 

Bourne served a float that hit the net and trickled over, getting maybe -- maybe -- to the one foot line. Against almost any team in the world, this is certain death. Ace, game, set, match, bronze medal. Thank you, come again. But this wasn’t just any team in the world -- this was Russia, currently one of the best teams in the world of beach volleyball, one of the only pairs who can regularly contend with Norway’s Anders Mol and...

I had been struggling in beach volleyball lately. It's that weird transition from off-season to pre-season, even though we don't really have much of a real season to train for just yet. I was passing poorly, setting -- the skill I believe I do best -- inconsistent, siding out at the lowest clip in recent memory. It was frustrating. So I did what I always do when I'm struggling at something, be it writing, playing, lifting, eating, whatever: I looked through past journals to see what I was doing when I was playing better. 

What I found was that I was practicing differently than I had been. Three days a week, at least, my practice group would be limited to three people, and we'd repreprepreprep it out, for two hours. It's what I like to call a "meat and potatoes" practice: We're not doing anything fancy, just hammering out the basics, the fundamentals, over and over and over again.

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At the time, it seemed like the silliest drill I’d ever done.

Two days before p1440 Huntington Beach, at the end of the 2018 season, our coach, Leandro Pinheiro, had us jumping over a bench -- to begin our approach.

I’ve long been a supporter of making everything as gamelike as possible. It’s always made the most sense to me: Train how you play. When you play, you sure as heck aren’t jumping over benches to begin an approach. You shouldn’t be jumping at all.

But Leandro saw something in my partner, Myles Muagututia, and I that he didn’t particularly like, and he wanted to fix it. All week long, we were getting ahead of the set, so when we went to swing, the ball was either on top of our head or a little behind us. We lost power, precision, and vision in virtually all of our attacks. We were still able to function, mind you, in the same sense that we can all function on six or seven hours of sleep. Eight hours is just inarguably better, just as...

The first skill I learned in beach volleyball was hand-setting.

To most, this seems to be a momentous accomplishment. Many find hand-setting to be the most difficult skill in the game, since it’s the only one where, should you do it incorrectly, the other team is awarded a point immediately. Karch Kiraly considered it a luxury. 

To me, it’s the skill that made the most sense to learn first.

When I moved to Florida, in April of 2014, I knew only one person, my childhood friend, Mark Lammey. When he found out I was moving to Florida, he was so excited for me that he asked if he could come, too.

Absofreakinglutely!

We found an apartment, signed the lease, sight unseen, and began our Florida adventure with an 18-hour road trip from Baltimore to Navarre.

Neither of us had ever played beach volleyball before, outside of the jungle ball stuff that is as much beach volleyball as putt-putt is to golf. I wouldn’t begin playing for another few months, when I made a few...

I was no different than anybody else when I began playing beach volleyball: I was bad enough to the point that only a handful of sane people volunteered to play with me. I couldn’t blame them, of course. I was genuinely terrible. If you wanted a good cardio workout, you could volunteer to chase down my passes. Other than that, I was of little use on the volleyball court.

With a limited pool of people to play with, I opted to simply practice as much as I could by myself. Most in the beach community are under the impression that you need multiple people to practice and train in order to get better.

I think this is a poor excuse. I grew up shooting hoops in my driveway until my fingers were bleeding, pounding balls at the driving range, putting and putting and putting, swimming laps for hours, running sprints in my backyard. 

In every single sport, you can get better by yourself. In some cases, this is even preferable.  

Want to show your support and...

The first time I touched a beach volleyball was in June of 2014. It was a blind draw fours tournament at a little bar off the Gulf of Mexico named Lagerhead’s. I was, as you might be able to guess, quite awful.

Regardless, a month later, I signed up for my first open tournament with my buddy, Shaun Rannals.

Keep in mind, at the time, an open tournament in the southeast was the equivalent of a AA, at best, in California. There was one legitimately open level team, Matt Blanke and JM Plummer, who remain two of my closest buds to this day. There were some other decent players – a teenage Evan Cory, who is now an athletic freak; JD Hamilton, one of my best friends, who was good but still had a long way to go (he has come that long way and then some); Derek Zimmermann, a former AVP main draw level player; Joey Keener, a ball control wizard and the most charismatic man on the planet.

The point I’m making is that it wasn’t quite as egregious as it sounds, a total...

The p1440 Developmental Program, while short-lived, was also one of the most formative training periods of my beach volleyball career. It’s sort of what I’d imagine competing on a men’s college team would be like. The levels between the players were relatively close, most of us being the upper AVP qualifier or lower main draw types. We talked a lot of trash in that brotherly kind of way where you outwardly loathed it but also undeniably enjoyed it.  We competed. We were all poor but still found an inordinate amount of money to spend at Brother's Burritos. 

It was awesome.

At the helm of the Dev Program, as we called it, was Marcio Sicoli. His name might ring a bell for a few of you. He coached Kerri Walsh Jennings and Misty May-Treanor to gold in London, then coached Walsh Jennings and April Ross to bronze in Rio. He served as Jake Gibb and Taylor Crabb’s first coach. He’s been coaching Pepperdine, one of the most historically powerful NCAA...

In Huntington Beach one morning a few years ago, Jose Loiola was conducting a few ball control drills for the two young women who were, at the time -- and still -- two of the biggest names in women's beach volleyball: Sara Hughes and Kelly Claes.

I can’t remember the year exactly, so forgive me for not being able to detail their lengthy list of accolades as it stood at the time, but whether it was their junior or senior year of college doesn’t really matter. What I know for sure was that they had won upwards of 100 matches in a row; they were, at least, back-to-back National Champions, on their way to a third; they were making AVP finals. They were the most dominant team not just in college beach volleyball, but in the entire NCAA, right up there with the UConn women’s basketball team.

New to beach volleyball at the time, I didn’t try to hide the fact that I had all but taken out a notebook, sat next to their court, and wrote down every drill...