Cross-Training In The Sand

Making It Work

Beach and indoor volleyball are 2 different sports. That’s clear enough when you look at the results of Nebraska and Texas on the beach. Packed with some of the best indoor players in the country, Texas went 1-12 last season. Texas is now shifting to a true beach-only or, at least, beach-focused roster, so that’s likely to change; quickly. Simply throwing great volleyball players on the sand isn’t enough to consistently win beach matches in the NCAA. With beach volleyball getting more funding every year, crossover players are becoming increasingly rare.

But what I want to look at are the pros and cons of cross-training between indoor and sand, both at the NCAA and juniors level.

I was in the WCC when NCAA Beach volleyball first kicked off, and every program had essentially nothing but crossover players. It was a big deal when Hughes and Claes, both among the best indoor players in their class, forgoed playing indoor completely and went beach-only. This year in Gulf Shores, the typical team competing in the top-8 will have 2 or fewer crossover players in their starting-10.

Is It Worth It? NCAA Edition

On one side of this you have progams like Nebraska or 2023-Texas who clearly could support full-time beach or beach-only players. On another side, you have programs who have a bootstrapped beach program that’s only viable because the indoor coaches are pulling double-duty and the indoor and beach rosters are identical. Somewhere in the middle are programs who might have a little scholarship money to supplement a primarily-crossover roster with a few beach-only players. 5th-year transfers or stay-an-extra-year grad students are usually the beneficiary of that money.

So, is it worth it for an NCAA program?

It depends on your perspective. From a beach-only perspective, you’re not building a top program with crossover players as the bulk of your roster; the indoor season is just too long. But is it worth it for an indoor program to invest in a beach program as a means to enhance their program? I think it can be, especially as part of a transition period. This is especially true if you’re recruiting from a population base of players that have some experience on the sand as high schoolers.

2016 was my last season at LMU, and it was also right as the beach program started to transition to a real team of its own, rather than just an offseason opportunity for the indoor players. But several indoor players made big contributions over the next few years. In 2022, half of the top-6 (1s, 2s, 3s pairs) were recruited to LMU as indoor players.

The benefits of a beach program to the indoor side are several:

1. It’s fun. Maybe. You need to know the players you are recruiting. Many players see the ability to play both indoor and beach as a plus, but some will see it as a negative and it may affect their decision if playing beach is a requirement.

2. It might have fitness benefits. You already know that Conditioning Doesn’t Matter, but varied stimuli can help create better athletes. You’re going to move on the beach in ways that are related-enough to how you move indoors to benefit you, but different enough to create potential new adaptation.

3. Players will have different roles. Some of your indoor stars will be beach stars but some won’t. Some of your best beach players will be indoor starters, but some won’t. The changes in roles and opportunity are an opportunity for both motivation and growth. (They’re also an opportunity for things to go sour, so this one cuts both ways.)

4. Beach volleyball almost certainly has mental benefits. I hate saying one sport is harder than another, because anything done at a high level is, by definition, really difficult. But I’ll say it: beach volleyball is harder mentally than indoor volleyball. The reason is that beach volleyball iterates faster. If you miss your serve indoors, you have 11 servers before your next serve. On the beach, there’s only 3 servers between your miss and your next serve. Likewise, the sideout iteration happens faster. I believe this iteration requires you to adapt faster on the beach or risk getting blown out. That has positive benefits for players coming back to indoors.

The downsides?

It’s a lot of extra work. Coaching an NCAA beach team is really hard- in my opinion a significantly more difficult logistical challenge than coaching an NCAA indoor team. There are other things that are harder indoors, but the logistics of planning and executing practice can be really difficult on the beach because you’re dealing with 6+ teams rather than 1.

Many coaches are (rightly) worried that focusing on training a beach team is going to take away from their recruiting efforts or their ability to make improvements on the indoor side during the spring season. If you’re going to start a beach program, you’re going to need to have your ducks in a row, or else the logistical overload is going to outweight the benefits.

Alignment is the final hurdle to consider for crossover programs. A program where the all the indoor coaches are also all of the beach coaches doesn’t have an alignment problem. A program where only 1 or 2 players crossover also doesn’t have an alignment problem; the crossover players focus on indoor in the fall and beach in the spring and those respective seasons get priority. The challenge is greater when the beach program is closer to 50/50. If a bunch of players are crossing over, but there’s fundamental differences in culture, philosophy, or principles between the beach and indoor programs, you’re set up for conflict.

I think a crossover program can be done really well, I’d just want to be intentional about how I set things up and clear about how the decisions are being made.

Is It Worth It? Juniors Edition

At the juniors level, this question has a more clear answer: yes!

For individual juniors players, the best thing they can do in the offseason is play some beach volleyball. Again, you get enough variety to keep your mind and body adapting while keeping enough similarity to avoid the (often overblown) worries about your skills getting so rusty.

I don’t worry about fears like creating bad habits on the sand that will mess you up indoors. Honestly, if the beach game creates such bad habits (or vice versa) and you can’t switch from one to the other after a couple practices to adjust… you’re probably not a good enough athlete to make it in either.

A recent podcast I listened to with an NFL trainer defined good athletes as, “people who can rapidly acquire new movement skills.” Well, if that’s what a good athlete is, then becoming a better athlete, in the broad sense, means, “improving my ability to acquire new movement skills.” Meta-learning, in other words. A great way to do that is to do athletic things that are similar enough to what you’ve done such that they don’t require a long familiarization process but varied enough that the stimulation is novel.

One of the best things about beach volleyball competition is the iteration. You cycle more quickly between service opportunities and you’re involved in every sideout opportunity. This forces quicker adaptation and problem-solving than in indoors. Sadly, the youth sports industrial complex has also glommed on to beach volleyball and many kids are playing in beach programs that apply helicopter coaching on the beach as well.

The good thing is, if you’re running a juniors program, you can reap a lot of these benefits for your athletes, and, by extension, your program.

How-To: Juniors