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Sand volleyball was granted emerging sport status by the NCAA in 2009, which means it is recognized as a sport "intended to help schools provide more athletics opportunities for women, more sport sponsorship options for institutions and help that sport achieve NCAA championship status." Now, it is up to schools and coaches to get the sport off the ground and make it a success.

"There are a good number of schools committed to doing this right now, with or without scholarships, and I think once other schools see the intensity of these athletes and the interest in the sport, they will jump in," says Mick Haley, Director of Women's Volleyball at the University of Southern California.

As programs continue to make preparations for the inaugural season, there are still a lot of question marks, though. How are schools funding the sport in this era of shrinking budgets? How will teams be formed? Will recruiting change? What will happen to the nontraditional indoor season? And how will the game grow?

CALCULATING COSTS
One of the primary considerations for any school looking to start a sand volleyball team is the cost. The NCAA estimates annual operating expenses at $35,000 to $50,000, with start-up costs in the range of $100,000 to $150,000, which is on the low end for NCAA sports. But this can vary greatly depending on if a school chooses to offer scholarships (up to three are allowed in 2011-12), allocates additional funding for coaches, and needs to construct a sand volleyball court. Another variable cost is the amount of travel to road matches and tournaments.

"As much as sand volleyball is a relatively inexpensive sport to start, it's not free," says Kathy DeBoer, Executive Director of the American Volleyball Coaches Association (AVCA). "Even the schools that aren't adding new scholarships still have expenses for competitions, travel, and officials. And coaching staff salaries can vary a lot."

For example, at Southern Cal, Haley is overseeing the entire volleyball program and continuing to serve as Head Coach of the indoor team, while Anna Biller Collier was hired in July to serve as Head Coach of the sand team. The school promoted an assistant coach, Tim Nollan, to Associate Head Coach for the indoor team, while indoor assistant Cookie Stevens will also be an assistant for the sand team. Nollan will oversee recruiting for both squads.

Other schools, like Pepperdine University, are not altering their staffing at all. Head Coach Nina Matthies will serve in the same role for the sand team, and Assistant Coach Marcio Sicoli (who has extensive experience coaching beach players) will join her. Pepperdine's other Assistant Coach, Tim Jensen, will stay indoors in the spring.

A third option is elevating an assistant indoor coach to become head sand coach. Tulane University has followed this path, offering Associate Head Coach Amy Williamson the Head Coach position for the outdoor team.

The cost of building sand courts is also a major consideration. Tim Edfors, Head Coach at Webber International University, an NAIA school in Florida, got outside funding to construct four courts at his school.

"It's a ton of money for the sand alone," Edfors says. "We got a lot of it donated because one of our alumni owns a sand mine. The school bought the nets, and I paid for the poles out of my own pocket."

Edfors shares that the cost of the sand is roughly $200 per truckload plus an $80 delivery fee. He says it took between 60 to 80 truckloads of sand to complete the courts at WIU.

Southern Cal is in the process of securing donations to build its courts. "The costs vary a lot," says Haley. "Some people are trying to build a facility for $600,000 and some for $2 million. It depends on the cost of land, the cost of sand, the number of courts you're putting in, and so on."

Even if your school is located near a beach, most programs want an on-campus facility, since practicing by the water means dealing with the wind, changing sand conditions, the public, and the commute. "All the teams, whether they're in the Midwest, on the East Coast, or on the West Coast, want to have facilities on campus," says Haley.

Mercer University is building three sand courts as part of a new athletic complex that will also include fields for baseball and football. "All of our athletic facilities will be in one location, which is really convenient for us," says Head Coach Noelle Rooke. "The location will be key for us being able to draw people to our games. It will be very visible."

At Florida State University, the school is constructing a five-court facility on campus, which is slated to be completed by the end of this fall's indoor season. The squad used a local two-court facility last year.

DeBoer suggests that building courts on campus is not that tough of a sell to administrators. "The beauty of sand courts is that they're almost indestructible, so you can play on them 24/7," she says. "I think you'll see a tremendous amount of recreational play on the courts as well."

FORMING A TEAM
Another potential big expense is scholarship money. But to start, many schools are putting together their teams without handing out a lot of tuition dollars.

"We have a scholarship or two for the sand program, but we also are getting a ton of walk-ons," says Haley. "That's amazing considering it costs about $62,000 to go to school here, with tuition being about $43,000. We're getting a lot of fifth-year students, a lot of transfers, and a lot of incoming freshmen who are willing to walk on to try to make the sand team. It's easier to recruit for this sport because so many women are interested in it.

"We think we're going to have 14 to 17 players training this spring," he continues. "If we were fully funded, we would have people absolutely lining up to get in here."

Matthies echoes that sentiment. "Recruiting has been great," she says. "It's exciting to be in the beginning stages of an emerging sport. Most of the high school kids and most of my kids here are fired up about it."

What are coaches looking for in sand players out of high school? At Florida State, Head Coach Danalee Corso has some very specific qualities she's seeking in recruits. "I want players with good all-around skills," she says. "I want kids with an ultra-competitive personality and a great volleyball IQ. I want smart players."

Florida State announced its first sand recruiting class in April, bringing in two junior college players and one high school athlete. All three have extensive experience with the beach game.

Most schools, though, are seeking players who can contribute to both the indoor and sand teams, at least to start. "We strive to always recruit well-rounded athletes," says Matthies. "For the past couple years I've told all our recruits that we are going to be doing both indoor and sand. All of the kids we've recruited in that time have known that this day was coming and have embraced it."

"I feel that the more athletic girls we get, the better off we're going to be in getting them to play a position indoors as well as being a sand player," says Rooke. "The bottom line is that not all of us are getting a lot of scholarship money, so we need to utilize as many dual-sport athletes as we can."

At Southern Cal, Haley is mixing and matching. "We have one coach serving as recruiting coordinator for both our indoor and our sand teams so we don't get in a tug-of-war over athletes," he says. "If a player comes in on an indoor scholarship, she can also play on the sand team, but her obligation is to provide her best effort for the indoor team. If you come in on a sand scholarship, you have to play sand only [according to NCAA rules] for the first two years.

"We have looked at kids who play both when we've recruited for indoor because we thought it would really help our sand team. But you're only allowed 12 indoor scholarships," Haley continues. "I would guess that in five or six years you will not have many dual-sport players. You're going to have a strong contingent of sand players training for nine or 10 months."

Matthies has a very clear idea of how players will be divided among her two teams down the road. "My vision is to eventually have six kids on sand scholarships [when rules allow it], 12 on indoor scholarships plus walk-ons, and six 'hybrids' who will play on both teams," she says.

In the meantime, she will choose players from the indoor team for the sand squad. "We've been doing some of our off-season training on the sand for the last couple of years in anticipation of this emerging sport," she says. "At this juncture I have 18 kids on my indoor team. We will take our best 10 to 12 kids to train for the sand team. My sense is that this spring we will have six kids training indoors and 12 training outdoors."

SCHEDULING THE SPRING
With so many indoor players wanting to play sand, how will a team mesh the nontraditional indoor spring season (when athletes are allowed 20 hours a week of practice) with the new spring sand season? And how will coaches find time to also focus on recruiting during the spring?

"Every school that is starting a sand volleyball program in the Southeast has been communicating with each other," says Rooke. "Our sand season will run from the first Thursday of March to the last weekend in April. All you need in those eight weeks is eight competitions, with three being dual matches. I plan on getting our eight competitions done in four weekends.

"The struggle is that we're not only running our nontraditional indoor season and the new sand season, but we also need to recruit," she continues. "So, after talking with the other coaches, I think a lot of us are going to run our nontraditional indoor season during January and February and run our indoor "off-season" during the sand volleyball season in March and April. I just don't see any other way to do it when you coach both teams."

On the West Coast, Southern Cal will follow a somewhat similar schedule. "We're going to train for half of January, all of February, and half of March indoors for the 20-hour part of our nontraditional season and then we'll go to the eight-hour off-season," Haley says. "Anybody we allow to play sand will do so in the middle of March for six to eight weeks."

"There are some folks experimenting with the possibility of playing a nontraditional court date on a Saturday and then playing a sand event on a Sunday," says DeBoer. "The coaches will be creative in figuring this out."

WILL IT TAKE OFF?
By receiving emerging sport status from the NCAA, sand volleyball gains the advantage of needing to have only 40 sponsoring institutions within 10 years to become an official NCAA sponsored sport. The designation won't mean much, though, if the sport doesn't gain traction and grow. Haley is confident that will happen.

"It's the first nontraditional women's sport that a lot of women actually want to play," says Haley. "If you think about synchronized swimming, badminton, rowing, or any of the sports that have been added for women--how many women really wanted to play those sports? But I would say 70 percent of all women want to play some form of sand volleyball. It's the first time in a long time that the NCAA has added a sport that really has the support of the female athlete."

Statistics from the most recent Sporting Good Manufacturers Association survey are encouraging. It shows participation in sand volleyball grew by 25.8 percent from 2006 to 2008, with more than three million participants. There were 240,000 female participants in the sport under the age of 18 in 2008, with 64 percent reporting playing only the sand game and not indoor volleyball.

Although Division II schools have been slow to come aboard--none have announced starting teams yet--the list of Division I teams is continually growing. Along with Pepperdine, Southern Cal, Mercer, Tulane, and Florida State, other schools announcing the formation of teams includes: Long Beach State University, University of Hawai'i, College of Charleston, Stetson University, Jacksonville University, University of North Florida, Florida Gulf Coast University, University of Alabama-Birmingham, Florida Atlantic University, and Florida International University. Georgia State University will field a team in 2012-13, and Arizona State University, University of California-Santa Barbara, and University of Louisiana-Monroe have indicated interest.

"From a university standpoint, I think it's a great way to give female athletes more chances to compete," says Matthies. "And from a training perspective, it's a great strength workout. It takes players off the hard surface and gives them a chance to get out of shoes, socks, and kneepads. I've found that when our kids come back indoors after a couple of days in the sand, they're jumping out of the gym. They're strong. They're refreshed. They're very enthusiastic about doing both sports.

"I also like that it puts them in a different environment and helps them learn how to play the game by reacting with only two people on the court," she continues. "It's beneficial for the development of all the skills of volleyball."

Haley has another selling point for coaches trying to convince their schools to add the sport. "All the football programs want to use sand for low-impact training," he says. "If a school puts in four or five sand courts, the football team can train there and a sand team can play there."

But can the game catch on in colder climates? "The barriers to this sport growing are exactly the same as were faced by softball, tennis, golf, and baseball," says DeBoer. "All of these sports are better suited to climates where there's good weather. Costs are lower because you don't have to deal with indoor facilities.

"But if you compare sand volleyball to golf or softball or baseball, you'd have a much easier time playing this sport indoors," she continues. "It's more like tennis where without a great deal of space and investment, you can put a sand court into an indoor facility. You can move your matches indoors just like folks in the Midwest and Upper Midwest have done for years with tennis."

There is optimism for good fan support, too. "I think this will be one of the most popular sports we've ever put on a college campus," says DeBoer. "It's an easy game to understand in terms of the team format and how it's played."

Starting the NCAA game during an Olympic year may also help. "Our sport is growing because of the success that our American teams have had in the last few Olympic games," Rooke says. "As we add the game as an NCAA sport, I think it's just going to continue to grow."

"I expect strong local support," says Corso. "We haven't added a new sport since the early 90s, and our community is really excited about coming out for sand volleyball."

GAMETIME
Two-on-two sand volleyball is a very different game than the six-on-six indoor version. The structure of its competitions will be different, too.

"We hosted a dual with California-Santa Barbara last spring just to try out the NCAA rules," says Nina Matthies, Head Coach at Pepperdine University. "We set up our five doubles teams versus their five--just like college tennis. Our 1's played their 1's, our 2's played their 2's, and so on. The winner of the dual competition is whoever wins three out of the five matches.

"Eventually, it appears that we will have a national team champion, which will be the team that has the best 10 players--the most depth," she continues. "And we will also have a doubles tournament where they seed it out in brackets and crown the best two-person team."

Kathy DeBoer, Executive Director of the American Volleyball Coaches Association, relays more specifics on a national tournament in 2012. "We are in the process of working with a group of coaches to put together the fundamentals of the first sand volleyball national championship," she says. "It will take place the first weekend in May. We are still looking at different sites, but one of the places we've got our eye on is the University of Southern California because that would be the same weekend that the men's indoor national championship is there. We like the synergy of having two championship volleyball events in the same location. This is not yet set in stone, though."

Von Mitchell is a freelance writer as well as business teacher and Head Boys' Basketball Coach at Delta (Colo.) High School. He can be reached at: vandmmitchell@aol.com.