If you haven’t met Jason Dibelius, it’s actually quite possible you have. In volleyball circles, he’s best known as NYvarsity Sports, which is the name of his YouTube channel, an exhaustive, beach volleyball-heavy stream that allows us all to ignore work and instead watch the action from AVP New York or AVP Chicago or AVP Manhattan Beach or a NORCECA or even the USAV Collegiate Beach Championships.
Frankly, it’s awesome, and if you aren’t subscribed to him, you should do so as soon as you can, because those work days aren’t getting any shorter, and I’d recommend you pad to his growing total of 300,000-plus views thus far.
He’s added a few extra features this season. Aside from the standard match videos, Dibelius has included a Tuesday After Episode, where he discusses that weekend’s tournament in interviews with a number of players.
Most recently, he added the most beloved feature in all of sports highlights: Top 10. In the wake of a rowdy Manhattan Beach Open, in which Dibelius, at last count, had uploaded 29 matches, he broke it down to a Top 10.
Before we get into the actual idea of the Top 10 — which is AWESOME — I want to take a second to acknowledge the absurd amount of time it must have taken Dibelius to put this together. As far as I know, Dibelius is a one-man band. He doesn’t have a SportsCenter production crew. He doesn’t have video editors breaking it down for him. He doesn’t have a team of videographers who can earmark when a phenomenal play was made. It’s just him, breaking down 29 matches worth of video into 10 plays. A beach volleyball match takes, on average, an hour or so, especially in AVPs, with technical timeouts and player timeouts and whatever other delays players can invent to stunt the momentum of the other team. This means that Dibelius poured over roughly 29 hours of video to create a minutes-long segment. For free (I think?). Kudos to that guy.
As for the idea of the Top 10 itself, I love it. It’s exactly the kind of stuff that beach volleyball needs more of, and I hope the AVP, with its abundance of resources and technology, begins to integrate more of it into its content.
Without further adieu, here’s the Top 10. It’s not fancy. It’s not incredibly high quality. But it’s a start. It’s the right direction.
You can find the Top 10 at the 1:25 mark.