The 2025 Hermosa Open will be held on September 4-7, with a 32-team main draw. Eight teams will come from a single-elimination qualifier. Currently, prize money stands at $130,000 minimum, and Mark Paaluhi is seeking to raise it to $200,000. You can register for the event here. 

HERMOSA BEACH, California – It was to be a one-year deal. Nothing more.

Mark Paaluhi, not unlike the majority of beach volleyball fans around the United States, took note of the not-so-small hole on the professional beach volleyball calendar in 2024: There was no Hermosa Beach on any schedule save for the CBVA.

Unlike anybody else, however, he did something about it. A Hermosa Beach native, living the majority of his life between eighth and sixteenth streets, he called the city that has been home to him for 50-plus years.

Could they put something together?

Sure thing. Here’s the permit, expedited and delivered.

Now he just needed sponsors to fill out the $200,000 – minimum – he was hoping to distribute as prize money.

It took one call. Kind of.

A buddy of Paaluhi’s put him in touch with Wedbush Securities, a financial services business that has long been making cameo appearances in the beach volleyball world with individual player sponsorships.

“Wedbush immediately responded, ‘I want in,’” Paaluhi recalled on this week’s SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “A couple days later, I had a sponsor deck, and he goes ‘I want the Platinum deal.’”

And then Paaluhi didn’t hear from him for a month and a half.

His contact was on vacation in the Caribbean, “and I could picture him relaxing on the white sands, looking at the platinum, saying yes, and then radio silence for six weeks.”

Paaluhi laughed at the memory. It’s easy to laugh now, when the 2024 event worked out better than anybody could have reasonably predicted. But in August? When Paaluhi had only $75,000 raised and a month before the event?

Cold sweats.

“I thought, ‘Well, we’re going to play for $75,000.’ That was all I kept thinking to myself,” Paaluhi said. “I couldn’t get ahold of him.”

Back from vacation, however, Wedbush reached back out. He was still in, don’t worry, only he wanted to go bigger.

“It’s hard,” he told Paaluhi, “to do just one event.”

“Let’s just get this one year in,” Paaluhhi said.

“Mark, if you get me a three-year deal, I’m in.”

“Oh my God, you’re on.”

It sounded like a wonderful idea in the moment. Three more years of professional beach volleyball in Hermosa Beach, run by the city, for no other reason than because he saw it as the right thing to do?

Paaluhi walked away from that conversation wondering “‘What are you thinking?’ I was just going to do one time, done, wash my hands, and hopefully the AVP comes back. Next thing I know, I put my foot in my mouth and say ‘OK, let’s go.’”

A three-year deal is what Wedbush sought. A three-year deal is what he got.

Now Paaluhi and the city of Hermosa Beach just needed to pull it off.

“We have the lifestyle”

It is easier, of course, to replicate a previous success. The fact that Paaluhi, the founder of Day at the Beach Events and the co-founder of Sand Court Experts, was able to muster together $250,000 in four months, assemble an elite and entirely unique field of professionals, sign a deal with Volleyball TV, and make the tournament so wildly successful that the city voted unanimously to grant him a permit for three more years is little shy of astounding.

“A lot of people love our sport, and a lot of people want to support it,” Paaluhi said. “Everybody loves our sport and it’s very simple. It’s not complicated. Unfortunately for us as fans and spectators, people overcomplicate it. They want a return, and I get it, but it’s not how this sport works.”

Paaluhi competed as a professional mostly from 1994-2000, sprinkling in more events up through 2009. He witnessed, first-hand, the halcyon days of the sport, when the format and rules were simple, the sport devoid of what he sees as unnecessary complications that have plagued the game for decades. That’s what he brought back in Hermosa: a double-elimination format, a pure open concept that didn’t limit the field, a set-up that remained within the means of what he had raised and promised to sponsors.

“I just don’t understand what is wrong with our sport that we have so much change in the past 20 or 30 years and there was nothing wrong with our sport in my opinion,” he said. “Some changes to the rules, little ones here and there, yeah they benefitted the sport. Let’s do it. Let’s move on. But the massive part of the format, the scoring, I don’t understand it – pool play? Modified pool play? It’s all a joke to me. Lucky loser? I just don’t understand it. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. Once you start a competition, you let the competition go and let the dominoes go where they fall. You let them play. That’s what the competition’s for. You let them play. You seed it prior to results, today’s a new tournament, let’s fire it off. That’s why we got the Hermosa Open.”

And that is perhaps why it was universally loved by both the players and the city. Dutch wild cards Leon Luini and Ruben Penninga lost both of their matches in Hermosa. From a sporting sense, sure, they were disappointed. They had just come off an impressive showing at an Elite16 in Hamburg, Germany, and they couldn’t even beat a few lower-seeded American teams who don’t even play internationally?

It was their favorite event of the year.

A city councilman had come down to the tournament and spoke with the first players he saw. Those players were Penninga and Luini, who told him that it was their first time in the United States.

“And you came to Hermosa Beach?” the councilman responded, a bit bewildered.

“Yeah!” they both replied in a manner that was not difficult to hear their enthusiasm.

“That was one of the first things they brought up at the City Council,” Paaluhi said.

There will be more of the same in 2025. Paaluhi is bringing back the elements that worked so well a year ago: the double-elim, the open format, the player parties at Tower 12, the grassroots marketing, all of it.

“Our whole sport has lost the lifestyle, and that’s the biggest selling point we have,” he said. “We have the lifestyle.”

And, whether Paaluhi intended it or not, Hermosa Beach will have it for another three years.