On November 13, 2023, the AVP issued a press release announcing the creation of a new eight city, eight team professional beach volleyball league. According to the press release:

“Each team will be based in a home market – including Los Angeles, San Diego, New York, Brooklyn, Miami, Palm Beach, Dallas and Austin – and have one starting men’s team and one starting women’s team. The top overall teams will then participate in an end-of-season playoff tournament and championship match.”

The summer Olympics traditionally has been a springboard for the popularity of the beach volleyball sport. Not to be ignored, the AVP announced the timing of the inaugural season of this new league to take advantage of the 2024 summer Olympics to be played in July & August in Paris, France.

“Beginning in September 2024, shortly after the 2024 Summer Olympics, the AVP League will launch with eight founding teams playing head-to-head in a regular season spanning September through November.”

In addition, the existing core, standalone, big money tournaments known over the last few years as the “Gold Series” are coming back, in at least some shape and fashion:

“In addition to the new League, AVP is reimagining its traditional two-player team tournaments into the AVP Heritage Series. Next season’s AVP Heritage Series will host multiple weekend-long tournaments in major cities across the country, including Southern California, Miami and Chicago.”

The guys over at Sandcast added some clarification in a recent mailbag episode, relating some information shared with the athletes during a conference call with AVP’s new ownership group. Notably, the 2024 Heritage Series would consist of 4 events, with Huntington Beach and Manhattan Beach being the two from Southern California. In addition, Travis and Tri explained that the league “draft” would be result based on 3 of the 4 best results from the Heritage series. 

One other notable tidbit from this episode was discussion of a new AVP ownership group. Apparently, Ballys, which acquired the AVP in July 2021, has recently sold some of their stake in the AVP. Details of this transaction are still unclear, but what is clear is that the new ownership/management, led by Chief Operating Officer Robert Corvino, isn’t interested in a “business as usual” approach.

We broke down the announcement on our YouTube page on November 15th.

2 weeks later we discussed our concern with the rollout of the league, on the complete lack of promotion on AVP’s social media platforms.

So here we are, 6 weeks post announcement. What little more information we have was from the guys at SandCast, relaying information given to them by the new ownership in a conference call. The general consensus from that pod, was that the players don’t know much more than we do as fans. And if this new management had more to announce, they would have announced it already.

So here we go, 8 teams, 8 cities. The first thing you’ll notice, if you look at a map of these 8 cities, is that they’re clustered in pairs.

Next, we look at the timeline. AVP Chicago is historically labor day weekend, so it would be reasonable to assume they’d have at least one week and weekend before the season got going. So let’s, for the sake of this theoretical, say opening night is Friday, September 13. 

Let’s also look at the cost of travel. We are assuming that the cities are paired for financial reasons, so let’s assume that, for example, the So-Cal teams travel to NY together with event and production staff, and both games are played during that visit. Let’s play that out, as an example week #1:

Let’s talk game times, broadcast, and distribution. Your typical matchday, based on the above, has four “games” per night. Each game, we believe, will consist of one men’s matchup and one women’s matchup. So we have 8 matches per night, from two geographic locations (except for the final home and home week). Let’s play out Matchday #1 on Friday, September 13th:

The AVP would mobilize two separate broadcast teams, and sell tickets for two venues per night. Here’s where I would get creative. Mobilize a third option, a wraparound style (think NFL Redzone) broadcast, that serves not only as a pre and postgame show, an intermission show, but that offers live cut-ins to whatever is tight and late. With two games on at once, on different sides of the country, you’re maximizing the potential for high action, high drama 4 hours of content. Then you do it all again the next night.

Now if you assume every team plays every other team twice, once home, and once away, a full season would take 14 matchdays. Based on the above 2 matches per week, you’ve have the regular season completed on Saturday, October 26. I personally love the idea of ending the season with your twin city home and home series, so let’s see what that looks like:

Now, let’s say the top two teams earn a bye and the bottom two teams are eliminated. Quarterfinals would be the #3 ranked team vs. the #6 ranked team and the #4 ranked team vs. the #5 ranked team. These would take place at the home of the higher ranked team over the course of two days, Friday, November 1st and Saturday November 2nd, back-back men’s womens, back-back both quarterfinal games.

The winner of #3 v #6 then travels to the #2 ranked team and the winner of #4 v. #5 travels to the #1 ranked team. Same structure, these games get played out over the course of two days, Friday November 8th and Saturday November 9th.

Finals takes place at a neutral site (why not Las Vegas?) the weekend of Friday November 5th, crowning our first AVP League Champions. Who says no? Let’s hear it in the comments!

Chris DeTurk – January 9, 2024