SANDCAST with Dane Selznick, p1440's tournament director

Dane Selznick has seen it all.

Seen every last one of beach volleyball’s many evolutions. He was there when players competed for little more than pride and maybe — maybe — a free dinner. He was there when two men named David Wilk and Craig Masuoka formed a promotional company named Event Concepts and began hauling in the Millers and Cuervos of the world and throwing legitimate prize money into tournaments. He was there when Event Concepts was booted and the AVP Tour was founded, in 1984, and when it collapsed, and when it formed again, and when it collapsed once more, to be revived in its current iteration under Donald Sun.

He’s seen both the golden era, financially, when 10 players once banked more than $100,000 in a single season in prize money alone, and he’s seen the most dominant era, when Kerri Walsh-Jennings and Misty May-Treanor once rattled off 112 straight wins and three consecutive gold medals from 2004-2012.

And now he is witness once more to the latest permutation in professional beach volleyball, the upstart event series, p1440, founded by Walsh-Jennings and her husband, Casey, and former college teammate Dave Mays.

In March, Selznick, who had been a tournament director for the California Beach Volleyball Association (CBVA), founding the Gene Selznick Invitational, an eponymous nod to his father, was hired as p1440’s Director of Competition and Sport.

“About a year ago, Kerri approached me and said ‘Dane, I have a project I’d love for you to be a part of,’” Selznick said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “She gave me a little bit of background, I brought it to the head staff at CBVA, got their opinion to see if it would be a good fit, and here we are. Everything’s moved along pretty quickly.”

Read the rest of the story, and listen to the podcast with p1440’s head referee, John Rodriguez, at VolleyballMag.com!