History
Playing volleyball at the beach, which is not the same thing as playing modern beach volleyball, evidently began in Hawaii in 1915, when the Outrigger Beach and Canoe Club set up a court on Waikiki Beach.
The main purpose of the club was to promote surfing, but when the waves weren't right, members often played volleyball while waiting for the surf to come up. One of the players was Duke Kahanamoku, the Olympic swimmer and surfing pioneer. Later, as athletic director at the Beach Club in Santa Monica, California, Kahanamoku helped turn beach volleyball from a leisurely activity into a fast-paced, athletic sport.
During the early 1920s, college students began playing six-on-six volleyball on beaches in Southern California. A number of courts were built at public and private beaches, especially around Santa Monica. Two private clubs in Santa Monica, the Beach Club and the Swimming Club, began regular competition in 1924, playing every Sunday from July Fourth through Labor Day weekend.
On public beaches, groups of families often played three-on-three or four-on-four games, depending on how many players were available.
The first recorded two-man game was played at the Santa Monica Athletic Club in 1930, with Paul "Pablo" Johnson and Billy Brothers against Johnny Allen and Charles Conn.
They originally tried using just a quarter of the court but quickly expanded to half the court, and finally they decided to use the entire volleyball court.
The two-player, full-court game soon became popular at other private clubs in the area.
In 1944, the Santa Monica Recreation Department staged the first of four annual tournaments for two-man teams. Similar tournaments were held in Santa Barbara and Long Beach during the next couple of years.
There were two major tournaments in 1948. The first annual Pacific Coast Outdoor Volleyball Championship was played at Santa Monica Canyon State Beach, and the first annual "Beach Olympics" at Sorrento Beach, conducted by the Santa Monica Professional Beach Guard Association, included a two-man beach volleyball tournament.
During the 1950s, beach volleyball spread to Northern California, Florida, and Brazil. An informal circuit of tournaments was established in California, some of them paying small amounts of prize money. And women began to get involved, first in mixed doubles, also known as "coed" beach volleyball, and then on two-woman teams.
The California Beach Volleyball Association was founded in 1965 to standardize rules and sanction tournaments.
In 1975, Winston became the first major commercial sponsor, putting up $1,500 in prize money for a Long Beach tournament. The following year, Olympia Beer sponsored the Inaugural Professional Championships of Beach Volleyball at Will Rogers State Beach, which offered a $5,000 prize for the champions and drew nearly 30,000 spectators.
The first sponsored tour began in 1980, with $52,000 in prize money for seven tournaments. By 1983, it had grown to 12 tournaments, including events in Florida, Chicago, and New York, with $137,000 in prizes.
A group of players formed the Association of Volleyball Professionals (AVP) that year. Unhappy with the allocation of prize money, the AVP boycotted the 1984 World Championships in Redondo Beach, California, and began running its own tour. Under the AVP, the tour grew to 28 tournaments with $4.5 million in prize money in 1988. In the meantime, women players had become unhappy with their status in the AVP, so they formed the Women's Professional Volleyball Association (WPVA) and started their own nine-tournament tour in 1987.
While the AVP and WPVA were focusing primarily on the United States, beach volleyball was becoming international. The first international exhibition was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1986 and a pro circuit was developed in Australia the following year.
The Federation Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB) then got involved, establishing its own circuit, with tournaments in Brazil, Italy, and Japan, in 1990. Beach volleyball was a demonstration at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, and shortly afterward the International Olympic Committee announced that the sport would be added to the 1996 Games in Atlanta.
In the first Olympic competition, United States men's teams won the gold and silver medals, with a Canadian team taking bronze, while Brazilians won the first two places in the women's competition and Australia finished third.
As the FIVB tour grew, the AVP began to suffer from loss of sponsors. In 1998, the AVP went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy and was restructured as a private, for-profit corporation rather than a players' association. The WPVA ran into similar problems and folded in 1998.
The AVP now works with the FIVB, allowing its members to take part in the FIVB's international tournaments, while also conducting its own tournaments for both men and women.
In 2002, the FIVB tour offered $1,750,000 in prize money for 11 women's tournaments and $1,600,000 for 10 men's tournaments. FIVB world championships have been held biennially since 1997.