Bummer. According to the LA Times:
“The Assn. of Volleyball Professionals held a conference call with its players Wednesday to discuss its financial troubles. Among the issues raised was the possibility that the tour, which began the second half of its 2010 season Saturday at Long Beach, would see its season cut short.”
All this is probably not helped with the introduction of rival pro tour sponsored by Corona, which has Karch Kiraly (Triple Olympic Gold Medalist in Beach & Indoor, and current assistant coach of the US Womens indoor team) as it’s “Chief Volleyball Officer”. Karch gives his two cents here.
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This is actually part of a wider debate in American beach volleyball circles that comes up quite often on the podcast I listen to (TheNetLive).
Basically there are two camps in the beach volleyball community: the ‘high performance’ camp and ‘lifestyle’ camp. They each have their own ideas about how the discpline should be conducted and promoted. The ‘lifestyle’ camp, who promote this tour, are generally of the opinion that beach volleyball has lost touch with the things that made it popular in the first place, ie ‘the lifestyle’. The ‘high performance’ camp maintains that the lifestyle side has been surpassed by extreme sports and that the future of beach volleyball is as a high performance sport.
The guys running the Corona tour are pushing the lifestyle side, including reverting back to all the old pre-high performance rules (9mx9m, no antenna, sideout scoring etc).
I find it amusing though that their ambassador is the one player who the golden age (mid 80′s to mid 90′s) who least exemplifies the ‘lifestyle’. A player who famously had no social contact with the partner with whom he dominated the sport. But that could just be me.
I reviewed The Net Live on my blog. http://markleb1.wordpress.com/2010/04/01/the-net-live/
The direct link to the site is http://www.thevolleyballnetwork.com/the-net-live
Straight from the horses mouth.
http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/beaconnews/sports/2552326,CST-SPT-volley31.article
And the July 26th The Net Live has a long, quite poignant discussion about the AVP’s problems.
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Markleb takes a shot at Karch Kiraly as not being social with his partner. That’s not exactly my perspective on the relationship. First, Kiraly was married and had a family, while his partner was single and had no commitments. Secondly, Kiraly’s partner was a very self assured person, who often rubbed people the wrong way. There was a notorious fight in the Players tent at one event where another player, Brian Lewis, claimed that the “then former” partner of Kiraly threw a sucker punch that led to an all out brawl.
At the end of the day, the Corona Wide Open Tour, to which Kiraly is aligned, is promoting the lifestyle elements of Beach Volleyball, but the Wide Open Tour is not the reason that the AVP is having financial troubles. Professional Beach Volleyball has always been in a precarious state in the USA because it tries to promote itself as a major sport but its fan base is more akin to a second level professional sport.
I didn’t mean to take a shot a Karch and I definitely didn’t mean to imply that he was somehow responsible for the relationship that he and Steffes shared. It was a business relationship, nothing more, nothing less and clear to all.
The point I wanted to make was that Karch has always been identified more with performance (winning and preparing to win) than lifestyle (hanging out at the beach).