Our final event of the year is always the San Diego polar bear, a draw doubles tournament held in Mission Beach.
The crowd is slowly growing after a tough few years of the old getting older and not enough young beach players showing up. The addition of juniors and parent/child divisions helped out, good job Polar Bear crew!
Its interesting that the tournaments in California seem to be shrinking, or have shrunk and stayed small. What used to be beach volleyball central is a scattering of smaller events. Possibly because of the restrictive nature of the state law? Competition also plays a factor, as pro players move away from the older events to start their own events, to give back more to the pro divisions (themselves). This never works out; the novice B division is our backbone. This fracturing inevitably leads to more, smaller events, less people, less entry money, less spectators, etc. We need a return to the 100+ court events in SoCal.
PLASTIC travels around the country every summer working the biggest, oldest, most successful tournaments in the nation and we for sure notice what works and what doesn’t. Hopefully someone can unite the southern California beach volleyball community to the level it once was. I for one miss doing events there, but we need more people in one location to allocate resources.
Players unite!
