by Kevin Cody
Kevin Campbell was stepping from The Strand to the sand to watch the 2024 Solstice Beach Volleyball tournament, at 21st Street in Hermosa Beach, when he was approached by former AVP (Association of Professional Volleyball) player Mark Paaluhi. They are longtime friends.
Paaluhi runs local tournaments, like the Solstice, which can rival pro tournaments in level of play and payouts.
Among the tournaments Paaluhi runs is the Hermosa Beach 16th Street Labor Day Tournament, which Campbell’s father Lee helped found in 1958. Campell, by virtue of having grown up playing the tournament, and becoming a banker, is responsible for the tournament’s Calcutta, which can rival the purses of pro tournaments.
Paaluhi told Campbell the AVP had canceled its 2024 Hermosa Beach Open, set for the following month. It blamed scheduling conflicts with the upcoming Paris Olympics. But every year the AVP had scheduling conflicts with the City because of the massive stadiums it builds for its four-day tournaments. The stadiums are an engineering marvel, but require a week before and after the tournaments to set up and disassembly.
Hermosa Councilmember Mike Detoy, upon learning the AVP Hermosa Open was canceled, called Paaluhi. Detoy viewed the Hermosa Open as integral to the city’s identity.
“I asked Mark what it would take to host a throw back tournament with top level players,” the firefighter and former college water polo player recalled.
Paaluhi followed up with a recommendation for an old school Hermosa Open, without a stadium, held in September, when the beaches aren’t crowded, and downtown business is slow. He also proposed the city take ownership of the event, just as Manhattan Beach owns the Manhattan Open.
The council said the city didn’t have the expertise to run a tournament, but agreed to waive the $19,500 in event fees if Paaluhi would take it on.
“I’ve got a permit from the City for a Hermosa Open in September,” Paaluhi told Campbell as the two watched the Solstice tournament.
Campbell knew what was coming next.
“I need a title sponsor,” Paaluhi said. “$150,000.”
“I might know someone,” Campbell said.
The AVP Hermosa Beach Open has played an outsized role in professional beach volleyball.
The 1990 Hermosa Beach Open, on NBC was the first ever beach volleyball telecast. A Hermosa Open has been held just about every year since the AVP was founded by its players in 1984.
But, the AVP pivoted last year from beach tournaments to indoor tournaments. In previous, years, the AVP held as many as 24 beach open tournaments, nationwide. In 2025, the AVP scheduled just three beach opens — the Huntington Beach Open, the Manhattan Beach Open and the Laguna Beach Open. It scheduled nine indoor “AVP League” tournaments.
Instead of a Hermosa Beach Open in July this year, the AVP scheduled a City League tournament at the Clippers Intuit Dome in Inglewood. The indoor courts required 300 tons of sand to be trucked in from a quarry in Palm Springs.
Giving back
Shortly after Paaluhi and Campbell talked at the Summer Solstice Open, Campbell invited Gary Wedbush to meet Paaluhi at Verve Coffee Roasters, in downtown Manhattan Beach, across the street from a Wedbush Securities’s satellite office. Wedbush’s main office was the 21-story Wedbush Building at 1000 Wilshire Boulevard. It was the first building Harbor Freeway commuters saw when they entered downtown Los Angeles. (This year, the company moved its headquarters to Pasadena.)
Wedbush was not a hard sell. He knew Paaluhi by reputation as the local “Godfather of Beach Volleyball.”
And volleyball is almost as central to Wedbush’s life as the 900-employee, financial services company he runs with his brother Eric, who is equally invested in beach volleyball, and a better player, Wedbush said in an interview last week.
“Volleyball has been good to me and my family,” he said.
Since moving to Manhattan Beach in the late 1990s, Gary Wedbush and his wife, Kelly, have raised three daughters and two sons, all club and high school volleyball players. His daughters played at Marymount High School. His sons played at Loyola High School and Princeton University.
Brother Eric’s and his wife, Cami’s, two sons played volleyball at Mira Costa High School and at the University of Southern California.
The Wedbush families knew the Campbells because the Campbells’ son played volleyball at Loyola and their two daughters played volleyball at Marymount.
Gary and Eric Wedbush played volleyball on their high school teams. After moving to Manhattan Beach, they began playing beach volleyball with the 22nd Street, Hermosa Beach Friday evening locals.
“We grew up in Ladera Heights, but we were always at the beach,” Gary Wedbush said. “We were in Junior Guards and our mom took us to ET Surf for back to school clothes.”
“In high school, I promised myself, one day, I would live here, and on a walk street.”
He and his family live on a walkstreet, within walking distance of his downtown Manhattan Beach office.
For the past several years, Wedbush Securities has been a sponsor of the AVP Manhattan Open, and also sponsored 11 AVP tour players. At the Manhattan Beach Open two weeks ago, three of the four finalists — winners Miles Evans, and Chase Budinger, and runner-up Phil Dalhauser — wore Wedbush hats and and bore temporary Wedbush tattoos on their deltoids.
“I like the AVP. I’m a big supporter of what they are doing. They had to try something different,” Wedbush said of the AVP’s indoor tournaments.
“The City League is modeled after bull riding, and 3 on 3 basketball. It’s good for TV and good social media,” he said.
But he laments the decline of AVP open beach tournaments, because the opens are an opportunity for upcoming players to compete against pros, he said.
Wedbush said he hopes the Hermosa Open, and similar, new tournaments in cities like San Diego, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz will fill the gap left by the lost AVP beach opens.
On a more personal level, he said, “If the Manhattan Beach Open is the Wimbledon of beach volleyball, the Hermosa Open is the Roland Garros [French Open] of beach volleyball. It’s been so important to beach volleyball for 50 years, we can’t allow it to go away.”
By the end of the Verve meeting with Paaluhi, and Campbell, Wedbush had agreed to move his AVP sponsorship money to the 2024 Hermosa Beach Open in exchange for title sponsorship. Since then, Wedbush has committed to being the title sponsor for the next three years.
Wedbush was asked if his famously frugal father, Ed Wedbush, who co-founded Wedbush Securities in 1955, would have approved of sponsoring beach volleyball. Ed Wedbush passed away in 2018, at 85. According to a Los Angeles Times article, when employees complained to him of holes in the carpet, he patched the holes with duct tape.
“Dad was a Dodger fan. He always wanted the Wedbush name on the centerfield fence at Dodger Stadium. So I think he’d be okay with it,” Gary Wedbush said.
Old school
Kevin Campbell grew up on the 17th Street walkstreet in Hermosa Beach playing beach volleyball because “that’s what kids did,” he said. Campbell’s godfather, defense attorney Bob Courtney, who co-founded the 16th Street Labor Day Weekend Tournament with Campbell’s father. Kevin and his friends shagged balls at the tournament until they were old enough to play. He also played at Mira Costa High School.
The 16th Street Hermosa courts, like the Marine Street courts in Manhattan Beach, were, and continue to be, proving grounds for pro players and upcoming pro players.
Campbell’s neighbor, Matt Gage won the 1980 Hermosa Beach Open with Jim Menges, playing for fans who sat in the sand on beach towels. Their prize was a pitcher of beer at the Poop Deck, on The Strand. Gage played in 110 tournaments from 1970 to 1983, and had 28 victories. His prize money totaled $5,525. A decade later, in 2003, Gage’s nephew, Scott Ayakatubby, received $17,400 for winning the 2003 Hermosa Open, with Brian Lewis. His 19 first place finishes, over a 20 year AVP career, earned him $980,224.
Campbell is hopeful pro beach volleyball can return to its old school ways, without the stadium trappings, but with prize money worthy of pro athletes.
“When I was a kid, there were no wristbands, no VIP areas, no stadium bleachers,” he said. He and his friends reserved court line seats by leaving their beach towels in the sand the night before the tournament.
When he got older and became a banker, what bothered him most about the stadiums was their cost was out of scale with what players were paid. Though Paaluhi’s proposal for an old school Hermosa Open was a budgetary necessity, Campbell believes it’s a better business model.
The ‘Godfather’
Paaluhi’s first sport was surfing. After moving with his family from Hawaii to Hermosa at age 6, he said, he surfed before school, after school and during school. He didn’t begin playing volleyball until his junior year at Redondo High, when his mom took away his surfboard for cutting classes on big days to surf the Redondo Breakwater.
After high school, he earned paramedic certifications from El Camino and UCLA, but his focus was volleyball. He played professionally on the AVP tour from 1994 until 2009. He also began coaching, producing tournaments, and founded Sand Court Experts, which builds sand courts for volleyball, soccer and tennis around the country.
In May of this year, he coached the Redondo girls beach volleyball team to the CIF Southern Section Division 1 championship. In the finals, Redondo defeated arch rival Mira Costa, which had won 170 consecutive games, dating back to 2022, when beach volleyball became a CIF sport.
Paaluhi is concerned that the AVP’s indoor tournaments will crush fan enthusiasm by cutting off the sport from its beach lifestyle core.
He’s equally concerned, like Wedbush, that elimination of the open tournaments will close off the pathway from high school and college play to a professional career.
“You learn to play basketball in the gym. You learn to play beach volleyball on the beach. Sports are about lifestyles,” he said.
Beach Volleyball fans have objected to the indoor AVP League’s faceless names, such as L.A. Launch, San Diego Smash, New York Nitro and Palm Beach Passion.
Fan loyalty has always been to the sports’ outsized personalities. Karch Kiraly, the GOAT who wore pink hats; Eric “The Body” Fonoimoana; the A-Team, Alix Klineman and April Ross, and players whose mononyms evoke an era — Von Hagen, Menges, Gage, Dodd, Walsh, McPeak, Jennings, Dalhauser and Budinger.
Paaluhi was known on the AVP tour as the “Flyin’ Hawaiian.”
Hermosa an Olympians stronghold
Like Wedbush, Paaluhi’s holds out hope of working with the AVP, but he is also hopeful the Hermosa Open will lead to similar, grass-roots, open tournaments in other California beach towns.
Hermosa is an obvious starting point for professional beach volleyball’s rebirth. Every Olympics year, no matter where the Olympics are being held, Hermosa’s wide beach, deep sand and nearly 100 courts draw national teams for training from around the world. Prior to the Tokyo and Paris Olympics, teams from Germany, China, Great Britain and New Zealand trained in Hermosa.
In October 2020, when COVID closed the beaches, former Mira Costa star Alex Klineman and gold medal Olympian April Ross, were, in the words of their coach Angie Akers, “Hungry for competition. It’s hard to stay motivated without competition.”
So Akers asked Paaluhi to quietly organize a tournament.
Paaluhi invited eight teams to 16th Street for a no money, no crowd tournament.
“The purpose was to keep their tournament skills sharp,” Paaluhi said.
Klineman and Ross, who would win Gold at the Tokyo Olympics six months later, finished third at the tournament.
“We came here to get some good competition, and we certainly got it. Third place wasn’t what we expected,” a disappointed Klineman said.
Kelly Cheng and Sarah Sponcil, who would finish ninth at the Tokyo Olympics, won the tournament.
The following August, one week after the Tokyo Olympics, Klineman and Ross, and Cheng and Sponcil returned to the 16th Street Hermosa courts to present an autographed volleyball to Hermosa Mayor Mary Campbell, and Councilmembers Raymond Jackson and Stacey Armato, in appreciation of the support the city has given beach volleyball.
Last September, one month after the Paris Olympics, 10 Olympians, from five different countries were among the 130 teams who competed in the first annual Wedbush Hermosa Beach Open.
Fans cheered and jeered the players from beach towels that fanned out from the court lines. Players responded with high fives and jeers of their own.
The men’s finals was an all Olympian match between Hermosans Chase Budinger and Miles Evans, who won; and Miles Partain, of Pacific Palisades, playing with Italian Olympian Alex Ranghieri.
The women’s finals was an all USC Trojans battle. Olympians Sarah Hughes and Kelly Cheng (Class of 2017) won 103 consecutive matches together at USC. Their opponents in the finals were USC All Americans Teresa Cannon (Class of 2019), and Megan Kraft (Class of 2017).
The $150,000 in prize money equaled that of the AVP Manhattan Open (which Budinger and Evans won), held three weeks earlier.
“The sport needs a complete rebuild. It’s not that difficult,” Paaluhi said in anticipation of the Second Annual Wedbush Hermosa Beach Open, to be held next Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, September 4 through 7 at the Hermosa Beach pier.
Top ranked players include last year’s Hermosa Open winners, and this year’s Manhattan Open winners Chase Budinger and Miles Evans, 2008 Beijing Olympics Gold Medalist Phil Dalhausser, Taylor and Trever Crabb, and last year’s Hermosa Open women’s winner, and Paris Olympian Kelly Cheng.
For more information about the upcoming Wedbush Hermosa Beach Open, visit Hermosa-open.com. ER
Really nice article. Thanks for writing it and big thanks to the Flying Hawaiian and the Wedbush boys for keeping the Hermosa Beach Open alive and kicking.