Hawaii’s inaugural sand volleyball season begins each day with an awe-inspiring Waikiki beach view. The first championship in this NCAA "emerging sport" will be collected in Alabama.
If that seems strange, know this: What happens in between will involve lots of imagination and experimentation, along with gallons of sweat and sunblock.
Fifth-year seniors fresh from indoor volleyball wars at UC Irvine (Larissa Nordyke), Long Beach State (Ashley Lee) and Hawaii (Elizabeth Ka‘aihue) are the Rainbow Wahine’s first scholarship players and have been training since fall.
Three weeks ago, 12 UH players, who ended their season against USC in the NCAA Regional last December, joined the trio on Queen’s Beach — Hawaii’s home for at least its first season. The season starts there March 17 against Hawaii Pacific and Nittaidai. The schedule includes only one more home date — April 7 against HPU. The Wahine go to Florida and California for their other matches.
On March 14, UH and Nittaidai play an indoor exhibition at the Stan Sheriff Center. Nebraska will be on Maui for another exhibition at War Memorial on March 23, as the new sand season dovetails with UH’s normal offseason indoor training.
"The first year is more about introducing the game to our players," says UH head coach Scott Wong, Dave Shoji’s associate coach indoors. "Yeah, we want to be competitive. But we want the indoor players coming back in the fall to be excited about the fall. We’re letting them learn another sport, which is a lot different from indoors, to get an appreciation of the culture of it, but still keeping volleyball fresh to them. It’s tricky. You don’t want to burn them out.
"It’s going to help us, if the coaches get it right, for our indoor sport."
A practice on Kalakaua Avenue, beside the Sunset At the Beach movie screen, is drastically different than what goes on indoors up in Manoa. First, there is that spectacular view people save a lifetime to experience, and is now part of the Wahine’s school day.
"I like the scenery best," says Lee, who is from La Habra Heights, Calif. "I can’t believe it’s a sunny day every single day. It’s a cool experience."
Intensity is also measured by a different standard. Players play seriously — their sweat equity is immense — but joke and laugh nonstop.
Walkers pull up a space on the wall and watch, sometimes for hours.
"They especially like to watch Jane (Croson)," says Nordyke — Ka‘aihue’s former Punahou teammate — about the Wahine freshman who won America’s first youth international beach championship.
Others park their cars in the loading zone to check it out. A driver playfully pulls his trolley full of tourists over and shouts out, "I got next!" Last week, two vans pulled up to watch, making it part of their tour.
Shoji wanders in from the water after stand-up paddling and simply watches.
"I think it’s helping," Shoji says. "It’s almost like an offseason conditioning program, with the sand, plus the touches on the ball. They are getting way more touches than they would usually, and I think they’re having fun."
The similarities between the indoor and sand games are the shape of the ball, height of the net and Hawaii’s seemingly constant lack of height.
"Indoors is totally different," says Ka‘aihue. "The setting is different; hitting is not about the person who can hit hardest and straight down. The smarter hitter does well."
The game’s demand for versatility and creativity makes for unexpected stars. The three scholarship players and "Awesome Croson" are ahead of everyone, but UH setters Monica Stauber and Mita Uiato possess all the valuable ballhandling skills and have thrived. Jade Vorster, a 6-foot-4 freshman middle, has taken to the sand surprisingly quickly. Emily Hartong’s dynamic athleticism might be even more obvious on the beach. Walk-on defensive specialists Alex Griffiths and Kayla Kawamura have the gift.
The sand is softer and gentler on the body, but conditioning is more critical. Sand sucks air out of a player and her jump and, with two-person teams, there is much more court to cover. Some rules are different and coaching is only allowed before and after games and at timeouts, putting a premium on maturity.
Wong, who hired Danny Alvarez as his assistant, has bumped on the sand 20 years, and brother Kevin was on the U.S. beach team at the 2008 Olympics. Scott says there are two other major differences in the volleyball games.
"The biggest is the well-roundedness of your skills," he says. "You have to be able to be efficient at every skill on the sand. Not great at all of them, but good to be a good player. The other thing is, strategically you and your partner have to figure out how to win.
"The best players make it look easy. … The obvious thing is the natural athleticism you see playing on a beach that people have a hard time walking on. To actually move and dig a ball 20 feet away and get up off the ground and run another 15 feet and jump and put a ball away. The good players make it look easy, but it is really, really hard to do."
Hawaii jumped into the sand game with both beat-up feet — "The worst part of this game is your toes get all messed up," Ka‘aihue says — along with 14 other Division I schools this first year. All but four (UH, Long Beach State, Pepperdine and USC) are in the Southeast.
A sport needs 40 teams to hold an NCAA championship, so the American Volleyball Coaches Association will conduct the unofficial Collegiate Sand Volleyball Championships, April 27-29, in Gulf Shores, Ala., the north-central region of the Gulf of Mexico.
"We haven’t communicated any goals," Wong says, "but this is a competitive group and they want to win a championship. At the end of April, we want to be in Alabama playing."
