Waikiki sand likely hosted the first beach volleyball
Beach volleyball puts two teams of two to six on a sand court split by a net. Like indoor volleyball, sides earn points by grounding the ball on the opponent's sand—with at most three touches and no consecutive hits by one player except after a block touch.
Beach volleyball is played on sand by teams separated by a net, and like the indoor game its aim is to ground the ball on the other side. Each rally opens with a serve from behind the end line, and a touch on a block counts against the three allowed, leaving only two more before the ball must go back over. In top competition a team is exactly two players, who must stay in play throughout with no substitutes and no fixed positions on court.
The sport probably began in 1915 at the Outrigger Canoe Club on Waikiki Beach in Hawaii, where George David "Dad" Center strung up a net, and early games used six or more per side. Credit for the two-man version goes to Paul "Pablo" Johnson, a Santa Monica Athletic Club member who in the summer of 1930 found too few players for a six-man game. Cheap to play, it spread during the Great Depression, reaching Europe too, and in 1948 a tournament offered a prize for the first time.
In the 1960s the Beatles tried it in Los Angeles and President John F. Kennedy watched a match. The first professional event, the Olympia World Championship of Beach Volleyball, took place at Will Rogers State Beach over the 1976 Labor Day weekend, organized by David Wilk of Volleyball magazine, and by 1984 a national tour ran 16 events with US$300,000 in prizes. Stars such as Sinjin Smith, Randy Stoklos, and Karch Kiraly drove a 1980s boom, and Kiraly won gold when the sport joined the Olympics in 1996.
The first FIVB-sanctioned international tournament took place on Ipanema beach in Rio de Janeiro in 1987 with a US$22,000 purse, won by Smith and Stoklos. The court is 16 metres by 8 metres with at least 3 metres of clear space around it, and the net top sits 2.43 metres high for men and 2.24 metres for women, with antennas rising 80 centimetres above it. The water-resistant ball measures 66 to 68 centimetres around and weighs 260 to 280 grams.
Source: Beach volleyball
