Dave Williams, Director of USA Beach Volleyball, is the medal maker
Dave Williams, Director of Beach Volleyball, USA Olympics. Photo by Bo Bridges (BoBridges.com)
The first time Brilliant, Ohio, native Dave Williams visited Hermosa Beach was for a meeting at a home at 7th and The Strand to sign a sponsorship deal between Corona Beer and Jimmy Buffet. Williams was Corona’s West Coast sales manager.
It was 1983.
“I wore a blue, three-piece, wool suit and felt like the biggest barney in the room,” Williams said. Everyone else was in board shorts and T-shirts.
During that same visit to Hermosa, Williams was introduced to sushi at California Beach, the original rock n’ roll sushi bar on Hermosa Ave.
“I thought sushi was a local fish, like halibut or sea bass and followed each bite with a swig of Sapporo. I was so sick the next day I haven’t had sushi since. Where I come from, raw fish is called bait,” he said.
But, aside from sushi, there wasn’t much else Williams experienced on that visit that he didn’t like. For the past two decades he has lived at 6th and The Strand. Today, his office is six blocks away, on the ocean view, third floor of the 200 Pier Avenue building, the new headquarters for the USA Olympics beach volleyball program.
Williams is managing director of the program, a pivotal position in the world of beach volleyball at a time when the sport itself is in a pivotal positon. On Friday the 13th of last August, the AVP (Association of Volleyball Professionals) shut down after nearly three decades, leaving professional players and their fans without a domestic professional league.
He was appointed to his newly created position in April 2010, just months before AVP’s demise..
Williams’ role is particularly challenging in a beach community whose residents have brought home medals from every Olympics since beach volleyball was introduced in Atlanta in 1996. (Manhattan Beach resident Mike Dodd won a silver medal at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Hermosa Beach resident Eric Fonoimoana won gold at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. Manhattan Beach resident Holly McPeak won bronze at the 2004 Olympics in Athens. And Hermosa Beach resident Kerri Walsh won gold at both the 2004 Olympics and the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.)
The AVP was expected to conduct the U.S. Olympic trials for the 2012 Olympics in London. With the AVP’s collapse, Williams assumed that responsibility. And perhaps more importantly, he assumed responsibility for the AVP’s former role as a “medal making machine,” as Olympian Mike Dodd once described it.
Morgan Beck of San Clemente and Chelsea Rashoff of Hermosa Beach will represent the USA in Korea this month at the FIVB invitatinoal. Photo by Bo Bridges (BoBridgesPhoto.com)
The operations man
Williams, 53, came well qualified to rebuild beach volleyball from the ashes of the AVP. From 2001 until he resigned in 2010, he was AVP’s tour operations director. During that period, he coordinated over 150 professional volleyball tournaments, perhaps more than any other beach volleyball organizer in the country. Previous to joining the AVP, he was executive director of the WPVA (Women’s Professional Volleyball Association.) He accepted the WPVA position, without a salary, as a favor to friends playing on the tour. He lived off the proceeds from his interest in Café au Lait, developers of Paradise Tropical Tea, which had recently sold to the Sara Lee Corporation.
Williams’ marketing experience dates back to 1981, the year he graduated from Ohio State University and became a district manager for Pabst Brewing Company.
But bringing financial and organizational stability to beach volleyball, though it consistently draws the Olympics’ highest TV ratings, has eluded others who appeared at least as well qualified.
Jason Hodell was a West Point and Wharton School of Business graduate and a JP Morgan turn-around specialist when he was appointed AVP’s CEO in 2008. Two years later the AVP filed for bankruptcy.
Hodell’s predecessor Leonard Armato had already rescued the troubled financial career of Kareem Abdul Jabar, made Shaquille O’Neil a cultural icon and Oscar De La Hoya a multi-media corporation when he bought the financially distressed AVP in 2001. But eight years later, despite $25 million in annual revenue, AVP was still losing money and Armato was forced out by shareholders, who brought in Hodell. Ironically, just months before his ouster, Armato had negotiated a $45 million offer for the AVP from the Disney Family’s Shamrock Investments. His shareholders rejected the offer because they thought it undervalued the soon to be bankrupt tour.
Others who have tried and failed to bring financial stability to professional beach volleyball have included sports agent Jerry Solomon (1994 to 1998), former Los Angeles Olympics CEO Harry Usher (1998) and the players themselves, who managed the AVP though the 1980s, with Armato as CEO.
Williams’ most valuable asset, next to the institutional backing of USA Volleyball, may be the good will he enjoys within the volleyball community.
Armato, who hired Williams when he acquired the AVP, said of his former operations director, “He has a gigantic black book…He’s a master of relationships at the local level and has a wealth of knowledge about the ins and outs of operations.”
One of those contacts was James Leitz, director of Action Sports for marketing giant International Management Group (IMG). IMG manages major events in over 30 countries, including the US Open of Surfing in Huntington Beach, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC and the Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon.
Williams’ and Leitz’s relationship dates back to 1997 when Leitz ran the Bud Lite 4 Person volleyball tour. In 2001, the year Williams joined the AVP, the two put on the first of five Mervyn’s Beach Bashes in Hermosa, a four-day volleyball, skateboarding, BMX, and music lifestyle extravaganza. Leitz said in an interview this week that the Beach Bashes became the model for the Huntington Beach USA Surfing Championships, the largest annual beach event in California.
Leitz hastened to add that the Manhattan Beach Open, which he and Williams will produce the weekend of August 26 will be “size appropriate. We don’t have to build a Taj Majal on the beach to be successful,” he said.
Manhattan’s City Council chose Williams and Leitz to produce the Manhattan Open over other promoters, in large part because of the decade-long relationship Williams had with the city.
Williams cites as one of his proudest achievements, working with Charlie Saikley, his counterpart with the city of Manhattan, in getting the women’s Manhattan Open plaques on the Manhattan Beach Pier Volleyball Walk of Fame. Saikley died shortly after the first plaques were installed in December 2004, but not before extracting from Williams a promise to organize an annual Volleyball Dinner of Champions. Williams enlisted Helen Duncan at the Manhattan Chamber to host the now annual event.
Kayla Mallet jump serves as Megan Fetch and Aly Squires watch. Photo by Bo Bridges (BoBridges.com)
The hitter and the setter
Leitz was one of the first people to congratulate Williams on his new position with USA Volleyball.
“Jim called me five days after I took the job and asked if there was anything he could do,” Williams said.
Williams’ U.S. Olympic Committee backing notwithstanding, he has just six employees at his Hermosa Beach office and a modest budget. USA Volleyball, which is responsible for the indoor and beach national teams, junior teams and Paralympics teams has 262,000 registered members, but an annual budget of only $18 million, substantially less that the former AVP’s annual budget. Beach volleyball has traditionally been the neglected stepchild of USA Volleyball, a condition Williams is determined to correct.
On its own, USA Volleyball lacks the resources even to produce the beach volleyball Olympic trials for the 2012 Olympics in London, much less a professional beach volleyball tour to serve as an Olympics “glide path.” The London Olympics are to be the first Olympics since 1996 for which the U.S. Olympic Committee will be responsible for selecting the U.S. beach volleyball teams. In the previous three Olympics, the selection of U.S. teams was controlled by the FIVB (International Volleyball Federation).
With IMG as his operational and marketing arm, Williams saw an opportunity for beach volleyball to be resurrected, full born.
Last November, Williams and Leitz announced a multi-year partnership under which IMG would produce the Olympic trials and a Beach Championship Series tour, with professional tournaments this summer in Huntington Beach, Hermosa Beach, Chicago and Belmar, New Jersey. But as the summer approached, no tournaments were announced and the usually upbeat, always accessible Williams stopped returning reporters’ phone calls.
Until mid-June, when the late August date for the Manhattan Open was announced, the USA Volleyball/IMG partnership had not scheduled a single event.
Meanwhile, former AVP player Albert Hannemann’s National Volleyball League (whose offices are downstairs from Williams in the 200 Pier Avenue building) lined up sponsorships from Wilson, Grand Touring Vodka, and Australian Gold skin care and launched a six event tour. The first tournament was held on the infield at The Preakness in Baltimore in May and offered $75,000 in prize money. The next tournament is July 22-24 at the Malibu Surf and Sports Festival with another $75,000 in prize money.
A second professional tour, Karch Kiraly’s Corona Light Wide Open, is in its third season. This summer’s tour consists of four events, including an August 20-21 stop in Hermosa Beach and offers $275,000 in prize money.
The reason for Williams’ uncharacteristic silence became apparent last week when he and Leitz announced they had finally signed a title sponsor for their tour. Jose Cuervo is to provide $500,000 in prize money for a three-stop Jose Cuervo Pro Beach Volleyball Series.
Jose Cuervo’s involvement in beach volleyball dates back to the 1983 Jose Cuervo World Championships at the Seaside Lagoon in Redondo Beach. The newly formed AVP picketed the event to protest the change from side-out scoring to rally scoring, an issue that remains contentious to this day among beach volleyball players. Rally scoring is quicker, more TV friendly because points are awarded to whomever wins the volley. In traditional side-out scoring only the serving team is awarded points. Hours can pass without the score changing. When Armato acquired the AVP in 2001 he decreed that the AVP would adopt rally scoring to bring the domestic league into compliance with FIVB rules.
Last August, when the AVP collapsed the week before the Manhattan Open, the local ad hoc committee formed to run the orphaned tournament elated traditionalists, while alienating many pro players, by reverting to side-out scoring. This year’s Manhattan Open, which will be televised on Versus (formerly Outdoor Life Network cable) will have rally scoring.
The Manhattan Open will be the first stop of the Jose Cuervo Pro Beach Volleyball Series. The second stop will be in Miami the weekend of September 9 and the final stop will be the National Championships in Hermosa (pending city council approval) the weekend of September 23. Next summer, the series hopes to have seven events, according to Leitz.
The $200,000 prize money at the Manhattan Open and the $150,000 prize money at the Hermosa and Miami events, though larger than NVL and Corona prizes, are modest by comparison to the $4 million in prize money Miller Lite put up for the AVP tour in the 1990s.
Cuervo’s title sponsorship, reportedly in the range of $2 million, is also a fraction of the $6 million Croc paid in more recent years to be the title sponsor of the AVP. Leitz, who emphasized his tour would be financially responsible, said he is confident that within a few weeks he will have contracts with additional sponsors, including volleyball, beverage and hair products companies.
Caitlin Racich hits as Tara Roenicke looks on. Photo by Bo Bridges (BoBridges.com)
Sand snakes
But even with sponsors being lined up, and the backing of the U.S. Olympic Committee and IMG, Williams faces steep challenges.
Professional beach volleyball has always been burdened by the need to build the temporary stadiums demanded by sponsors and TV, at up to half a million dollars for each three-day event.
With “sand” volleyball becoming a NCAA Division 1 and II college sport for women (and potentially for men in the near future), permanent beach volleyball stadiums might one day be sprinkled across the country. But no one expects that to happen soon.
Beach volleyball also lacks a family of products, which other sports rely on for financial sponsors. Professional surfing and snowboarding are supported by board and apparel manufacturers. Moto cross has motorbike, helmet and apparel manufactures. Volleyball has volleyball manufactures. The men wear surfboard shorts and the women wear swim suits.
“There’s not a family of products endemic to the sport,” Armato said. “So, to get back on track to where beach volleyball was in 2008, when we had $25 million in revenue, 17 hours of network TV and 100 hours of cable, beach volleyball needs to become a part of pop culture. It needs to be an aspirational sport in places where there’s no beach, like surfing has become.”
In addition, beach volleyball faces new competition.
“During the AVP’s strongest years in the early 1990s and early 2000s, there weren’t the X Games and 500 cable channels. The universe of sports and entertainment has become much more niche oriented,” Williams said.
Fortunately, Williams noted, success can be measure in ways other than financial.
The professional lacrosse league failed, but as one of the fastest growing sport in the U.S. it is still a success, he said
Similarly, soccer continues to struggle as a “sports property,” but is hugely successful in its number of participants.
“USA Volleyball’s job is to bring beach volleyball to every area of the country. If it’s true, as the boating industry claims, that there is recreational water within 90 minutes of every place in the country, then there’s also a beach. A beach on a lake is still a beach,” Williams said.
Trial by fire
William’s most immediate task, however, involves the selection of the two men’s and two women’s teams who will represent the U.S. at the London Olympics next year.
The Olympic team selection process has been plagued by controversy since the sport’s introduction at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, when the Swiss-based FIVB assigned one of the U.S.’s three “positions,” or berths to Sinjin Smith and Redondo Beach resident Carl Henkel. Smith and Henkel had chosen to play on the FIVB tour rather than the AVP tour. The other two men’s positions went to AVP players Karch Kiraly and Kent Steffes, and Mike Dodd and Mike Whitmarsh, who won gold and silver, respectively. Smith and Henkel advanced to the quarter finals in Atlanta, where they narrowly lost to Kiraly and Steffes. Kiraly had objected to the FIVB naming Smith and Henkel to the U.S. team. But following the quarter finals, Kiraly graciously acknowledged that Smith and Henkel “deserved to be here.”
In 2000, 2004 and 2008, to the exasperation of the AVP, the U.S. men’s and women’s teams were selected based on FIVB standings.
For 2012, responsibility for selecting the U.S. teams has been assigned to USA Volleyball. The teams will be selected based on their rankings at an Olympic trials to be held next summer, Williams said. The estimated 10 male and 10 female teams who will be invited to compete will be based on points they’ve accumulated on the FIVB and as yet undetermined domestic tournaments.
The decision to hold trials has been the most controversial of Williams’ short rein.
Top teams, including Walsh and Misty May-Treanor, and Todd Rogers and Phil Dalhauser, believe the selection should continue to be based on FIVB rankings. Walsh and May-Treanor are currently ranked third on the international tour. Rogers and Dalhauser are ranked first.
What makes the players’ argument compelling, says former beach volleyball Olympian Sinjin Smith, a member of the FIVB Council, is the complicated way nations are assigned positions.
Countries are awarded one Olympic position for each of their teams that is ranked in the top 16 on the FIVB tour, up to the maximum of two positions per gender. (A nation can also win a position by having one of its teams win a continental championship, a policy intended to favor nations from areas of the world without a beach volleyball history, such as Africa.)
Assuming Rogers and Dalhausser retain their current number one FIVB ranking, and Walsh and Misty May-Treanor retain their current number three FIVB ranking, the U.S. will be guaranteed male and female positions in the 2012 Olympics.
But that doesn’t mean the two ranked teams, themselves, will represent the U.S. in London. The International Olympic Federation has left the decision on which teams to send up to the national Olympic committees. And the U.S. Olympic Committee has decided to pick its beach volleyball representatives through an Olympic trials process next summer.
“In theory, Rogers and Dalhausser could be denied a berth and a team that has never won an international event could be sent in their place,” said Smith. “If I wanted my country to win as many medals as it can, at a minimum, I’d award the number one male and female berths to my internationally, top ranked teams.”
Fonoimoana explained that players who hoped to qualify for the Olympics had to decide in January of this year if they were going to play on the FIVB tour, whose season began in April in Brasilia, Brazil.
Williams acknowledged that the top ranked international teams have strong arguments. But he said players have known there would be an Olympic trials since USA Volleyball and the AVP agreed to partner on the process over a year ago. He did acknowledge that AVP’s bankruptcy and the time it has taken to secure permits and sponsorship for the USA Volleyball/IMG qualifiers has created confusion.
“There may be 50 different, equally fair ways to select our Olympic teams. We’ve decided on trials,” he said.
Nonetheless, the U.S.’s 2012 representatives will almost certainly be veterans of the AVP.
What concerns Williams more than the 2012 Olympics is how the U.S. will fare at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, a country where volleyball is second only to soccer in popularity.
Kayla Mallet waits for the set. Photo by Bo Bridges (BoBridges.com)
A beach umbrella
While Williams scrambles to help rebuild U.S. beach volleyball, other countries, especially poorer countries, are also accelerating their programs. One reason, Williams explained, is that beach volleyball is a relatively cheap sport. A second reason is that countries are obsessed with “medal count,” and beach volleyball is one of the few team sports in which nations can win two medals, because they are allowed to send two teams. Typically, in team sports, such as ice hockey, soccer and basketball, nations are allowed to send only one team to the Olympics.
In the absence of a dominate, domestic tour, Williams plans for USA Volleyball to serve as an umbrella organization for all professional tours, including Hannemann’s National Volleyball League, Kiraly’s Corona Wide Open Tour, and of course his own Jose Cuervo tour.
But even that is proving problematic. There are a limited number of summer weekends and a limited pool of non-conflicting sponsors.
Hannemann’s National Volleyball League tournaments in Miami and Long Beach are scheduled on the same dates in September as the USA Volleyball/IMG events in Miami and Hermosa. Kiraly’s Corona Wide Open stop in Hermosa is the weekend before the USA Volleyball/IMG’s Manhattan Open.
“We set our dates in January to avoid conflicts with other tours. I have seven months of marketing into those dates and now USA Volleyball is asking me to move my Miami and Long Beach dates because we both know the players, the sponsors and the fans don’t want two tournaments on the same date.
“I want to do whatever I can to help grow the sport, but we’ve made commitments to sponsors and players and we’re sticking with our dates. I don’t understand why, when they announced their schedule this month that they didn’t pick dates in October,” Hanneman said.
Williams responded this week that USA V and IMG had agreed to move their Miami tournament back a week to eliminate the conflict with the National Volleyball League’s Miami event.
Fonoimoana, who has assumed the role of elder statesman in the sport since retiring, said he’s concerned about the tour conflicts.
“These different tours need to cooperate,” Fonoimoana said. “There can’t be any missteps. After the problems with AVP, if sponsors get a bad taste again there’s the danger they’ll think we’re all crazy and the sport just doesn’t work.”
Williams and Hannemann said they are both still hopeful that the tour conflicts can be resolved in a way that is best for the sport.
Williams said he’ll also be working with the amateur tours, including the California Beach Volleyball Association, headed by Hermosan Chris Brown, and the AAU youth tournaments, headed by Denny Lennon. On July 15 and 16, USA Volleyball will host the USA Beach High Performance Championships for its youth team. Kellogg Cereal is also partnering with USA Volleyball to conduct youth camps.
Another plan Williams has to broaden his sport’s popularity is to make beach volleyball spring training in Hermosa the equivalent of baseball spring training in Arizona
Hermosans are already accustomed to seeing unusually tall Chinese men and women volleyball players training during the spring on the beach at 14th Street. Dutch and Italian national beach volleyball teams also train each spring in Hermosa.
With help from Dodd, who coaches the Italian team, Williams would like to organize exhibition games between the visiting teams.
“We might have a Chinese team play a Dutch team on the beach at Second Street while a U.S. team plays an Italian team at 10th Street,” Williams said.
Williams makes no attempt to hide his bias toward his adopted home town.
“My dad asks where I’m going on vacation and I tell him I’ve been to beautiful beaches all over the world and Hermosa’s my favorite.”
As for staging the 2012 Olympic trials in Hermosa, Williams said, “No chance. It has to be on the East Coast because of the time window we’re being offered by NBC. But the 2016 trials – if Hermosa wants it, that’s something I’d look forward to working on.”