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RIVERSIDE — Fifteen years later, it may still be the coolest event to ever take place in downtown Riverside, and possibly the entire Inland Empire.
For three magical days in April 2009, the downtown Marriott might as well have been the equivalent of beachfront property. The Association of Volleyball Professionals took over the parking lot of the adjacent Riverside Convention Center, trucking in 3,000 tons of sand to create beach volleyball courts and a sponsor’s village and putting on an honest-to-goodness tour event, with televised finals, star quality and an enthusiastic fan turnout that included much of the area’s volleyball community.
The current AVP tour returns to Southern California this week with the Manhattan Beach Open, played on an actual beach with a well-established template and a rich history. The visit to Riverside was a novelty, as it turned out, a one-off that was successful and popular but, as it turned out, just wasn’t beachy enough for the tour’s sponsors – who, at that point, were rightfully concerned about the financial viability of the tour itself.
The AVP had 18 events in 2008, an Olympic year, and 16 in 2009, including Riverside. There were 12 events scheduled in 2010, but the AVP went into bankruptcy that November, suspended operations and didn’t have a full tour again until 2012. The reboot wasn’t always smooth in succeeding years, but the circuit again seems on reasonably firm footing.
So maybe a beach volleyball tournament in Inland Southern California, part of what then was an emerging trend of taking the sport to non-beach cities, was always going to be a one-of-a-kind event.
“In a market where everybody is retrenching, that forces us back to our core, beach-going demographic,” then-CEO Jason Hodell said in a phone interview early in 2010, before the system broke down. “From all our feedback from our sponsors, they wanted us to target beach locations.”
It was understandable at the time, and even more so in retrospect. But this is for sure: The sight of people walking around in bikinis and board shorts in downtown Riverside, and spiking, setting, blocking and digging in the shadow of the Mission Inn and with the majesty of Mount Rubidoux as a backdrop may have been a one of a kind occurrence, but it was also a sign that Riverside’s city fathers could dream big and act ambitiously for a change.
Beach volleyball is played in the shadow of Mount Rubidoux during an AVP tournament held April 17-19, 2009, in the parking lot at the Riverside Convention Center. (Photo by Jim Alexander, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)
Come to think of it, that big mountain overlooking downtown played an outsized role in landing the tournament in the first place.
Rusty Bailey – then a newly elected city councilman, later Riverside’s mayor and currently a teacher-coach at Riverside Poly High – was Hodell’s roommate and volleyball teammate at West Point back in the day. Bailey planted the seed and got Hodell, at that point the organization’s chief financial officer, intrigued enough to have his director of operations, Dave Williams, check out the city.
Williams was hesitant, but he went. And the first thing Bailey did when he greeted the AVP official was to drive him up to the top of Mount Rubidoux.
“I wanted to give him a sense of perspective,” Bailey recalled. “I kind of showed him, from Mount Rubidoux, the lay of the land. UCR’s over here, Cal Baptist over there, downtown. You can see a couple of parks. So he had a bird’s eye view of Riverside, and I gave him the whole (story) of why we call it Riverside, with the Santa Ana River and all the way to the beach, and how we’re the middle between San Diego and L.A. and Orange County.
“But he really remarked when we were up there about the trees. He’s just like, ‘Wow, man, it’s a green city. It’s not a city of just buildings, or desert.’”
After that, the impromptu tour went to the city’s college campuses, drove down historic, tree-lined Victoria Ave. and then returned downtown to see the Mission Inn, the Convention Center a block away, and the adjacent parking lot that could house the tournament.
“And he left saying, ‘You had me at Mount Rubidoux,’” Bailey said.
Williams, who passed away from cancer in 2013, told me in a 2011 interview that on the way home, “I called (then-AVP commissioner) Leonard Armato and I said, ‘We’re going to Riverside.’ And he goes, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘Leonard, I’ll see you in an hour and let’s sit down. I’m telling you, we’re going to Riverside, we’re gonna make this work and it’s gonna be great.’ So I walked in and he said, ‘You better convince me.’
“It was a great site, a great event and easy people to work with,” Williams added, saying he appreciated Bailey’s “boundless enthusiasm. I didn’t know anything about the city, the staff, the protocol, the politics. He was like, ‘Get out of the way and let’s just do it.’ That’s what you need.
“A city staff’s default answer to every idea is ‘no,’ and that’s universal because it’s more work for them and they ain’t getting paid. It’s the opposite with a councilman. A councilman is like, ‘Let’s break through that logjam and do something cool.’ … I love Rusty Bailey. He got stuff done. Ted Weggeland (a former state assemblyman who later founded Raincross Corporate Group and was in at the start of the Riverside Sports Commission) got stuff done.”
Remember, this was during an era when Riverside was falling behind its neighbors, thinking small and acting accordingly. Ontario opened the area’s largest arena; Riverside had nothing even close until California Baptist opened its own arena in 2017. San Bernardino, Rancho Cucamonga and Lake Elsinore opened new minor-league ballparks and had thriving Class A teams; Riverside lost two minor-league clubs because neighborhood pressure prevented them from getting licenses to sell beer.
I wrote at the time, frequently, that those who didn’t patronize those attractions shouldn’t complain that there’s nothing to do in town. The volleyball event, and the surrounding scene, was a response. The public turned out, the atmosphere was joyous and fun, and who knows how big it could have gotten had it had an opportunity to build momentum in succeeding years.
Members of UC Riverside’s women’s volleyball team watch a match during the AVP beach volleyball tournament April 17, 2009, in the Riverside Convention Center parking lot. The UCR players participated in a collegiate tournament held concurrently. (Photo by Jim Alexander, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)
Something else came out of that short-lived event: Over the years, the Riverside Sports Commission became a significant force in luring events to the city, from youth sports tournaments to multiple events at Riverside City College’s aquatics facility (including the forgettable TV reality competition, “Splash”).
On the sand – much of which, said Bailey, was donated to other entities in town after the tournament – the action was entertaining. The defending women’s Olympic champions, Misty May Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings, were not competing that weekend, because Walsh was eight months pregnant. But the men’s gold medalists in Beijing, Phil Dalhausser and Todd Rogers, came out on top that week, while Nicole Branagh and Elaine Youngs, who reached the Olympic quarterfinals in 2008, were Riverside’s women’s champions.
You could say they made history. At Manhattan Beach, where they’ve been playing their tournament since 1960, plaques laid into the pier celebrate each of that tournament’s champions. Maybe there should be a plaque at Riverside’s Convention Center, celebrating its own champions and the year the beach environment visited the Inland Empire rather than vice versa.
jalexander@scng.com
Holly McPeak, right, goes up for a spike during an early-round match in an AVP beach volleyball tournament April 17. 2009, in the parking lot of the Riverside Convention Center. (Photo by Jim Alexander, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG.)
Originally Published: August 13, 2024 at 1:03 p.m.
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