This weekend will be the finale of the domestic beach volleyball season, in which the AVP will head to the wondrously charming city of Chicago for the League Championships, and it is, in the current edition of the AVP, the biggest of the year.
Hold on, you may — quite justifiably — argue, the biggest weekend of the year is the Manhattan Beach Open.
To you, dear SANDCAST readers and listeners, that is likely the case. To the AVP, however, the League is what they are prioritizing and championing. And, regardless of your feelings about the League or its new owners, Chicago will deliver. It will be a proper sellout, and not a pumped up “sellout” in the Hamptons in which 150-some people are in the crowd.
Better yet for the AVP: The lead-up to their crowning event has been an undeniably impressive wave of sponsor additions.
Now, as a general rule, I don’t generally comment on sponsors or “TV deals” – in quotes because, for the most part, TV deals in beach volleyball tend to be time buys, which are not deals at all but ad spends that more often than not result in a bottom line in the red – unless I have some idea of the financials or terms involved.
But, on what I’ve gathered to be the principle of the new AVP and how it goes about certain business, the additions of Progressive as a title sponsor – the first such sponsor I can recall since Crocs and Nissan during the Leonard Armato era in the early 2000s – and Delta, Corona, and Gatorade are no small matter.
When the new owners came in three years ago, they did so in something of a swashbuckling manner in which they would not only reset the sport, with a new format for its matches and a League rather than tournaments and arenas as opposed to beaches and tickets instead of the typical free admission, but a complete reset of the sponsorship marketplace as well. Prior to the new owners’ purchase of the AVP, the reputation of the sport was that of a beggar with its cup out: We’ll take anything you can give, kind sir. God bless.
No longer is that the case.
Gone were the sponsors who paid little, to the point that there were hardly any sponsors to find at all. Small deals that would have been taken under previous owners were turned down. AVP 2.0 would prefer to take nothing than set the precedent of accepting a pittance for, say, White Claw to be their alcohol sponsor. Instead, they’d wait until a proper deal came along.
It reminds me a bit of Matthew McConaughey’s resetting of his own acting market, in which he sought to shed the label of the romantic comedy guy who ran around beaches with his shirt off and inevitably wound up with the blonde around his arm. In an effort to become a more legitimate actor in legitimate movies, he turned down deal after deal – for two-plus years, until he headlined Mud and Dallas Buyers Club in 2012 and 2013, respectively. He hasn’t, so far as I know, appeared in a romantic comedy since. (if you haven’t read Greenlights, please do.)
This current wave of sponsors could be the Dallas Buyers Club Moment for the AVP’s new owners.
What the terms of these deals are, again, I don’t know, so this isn’t so much as me telling you what to think about it as me telling you what appears to be happening. And what will be done with the financials that come with it – more League teams? More tournaments? Bigger tournaments? More prize money? More staffing? An improved website? None of the above? – is still to be seen. But even the most ardent of AVP antagonists must admit, with a begrudging respect, that this is no small armada of no small names hitching themselves to the AVP.
McConaughey’s career has taken an enormous shift since he shed his romantic comedy label and emerged as a Serious Actor making Serious Movies.
Perhaps this is that moment for the AVP.
