Sand volleyball expects to benefit from new facility at Sunset Rec

Carpool? Check. Volleyballs and volleyball net antennas distributed among the passengers? Check. Ample time? Not quite.

When UCLA sand volleyball’s practice facility is more than a 7-mile drive through early morning traffic away from campus, time becomes a precious commodity.

“We had to force our practice into a two-hour window, and with warmups and everything it got pretty narrow,” said coach Stein Metzger. “We really didn’t get to touch the ball all that much.”

Given that a typical practice from last year came with the challenges of squeezing in a 7 a.m. breakfast in the dining hall before practice, and adding to that, the after-practice rush home for showers and classes, Metzger said the team could really only fit two days of practice per week. It became a unanimous decision to opt for an on-campus practice facility.

“The administration, the coaching staff and everyone was just like ‘This has to happen,’” Metzger said.

With a new on-campus facility set up in Sunset Canyon Recreation Center in May of 2014, No. 7 UCLA no longer has to deal with scrambling between the Annenberg Community Beach House and Westwood as it prepares for the 2015 season. As a result, the team has more than doubled its practice hours this season, going from two practices per week to five.

But a fuller, more efficient practice schedule isn’t the only growing area of optimism for UCLA’s newest team as it enters its third year.

Two years ago, UCLA was late to the party.

With a lineup comprised of players from the indoor volleyball team, the Bruins scrambled to put together an eight-game season – the NCAA minimum. This year, the Bruins are planning to compete in 16 matchups – the NCAA maximum.

When UCLA begins its season against Cal State Northridge Thursday, Bruin fans won’t see as many familiar faces from the indoor season as they did two years ago. The team’s lineup is starting to differentiate itself, with UCLA adding seven sand-only players to this season’s roster, including freshmen 2014 American Volleyball Coaches Association High School Sand Honorable Mention All-Americans Ivey Scmitt and Elise Zappia.

“It’s exploded on the beaches here on California, so there’s no limit to the amount of kids that want to come to UCLA and compete and play sand volleyball,” Metzger said. “It wasn’t hard to find some great athletes to come in who want to do it. And that’s what we did this year.”

With a roster now mostly comprised of athletes who specialize in sand volleyball, Metzger was able to schedule a fall practice block to drill in fundamentals at an earlier date.

Sophomore Laurel Weaver, who transferred from Nova Southeastern University to UCLA this year, said the fall practices were an opportunity for her and her teammates to sharpen the requisite skills of a sand volleyball athlete at an individual level before they start meshing that into the context of a two-player partnership in the winter.

“Even last quarter to this quarter, the level of improvement for each player has been huge,” Weaver said. “Now, everyone’s putting the skills together, and putting them together with ourselves and with our partner.”

As it stands, there are still five players on the roster who play both the indoor and sand game on this year’s roster.

For them, the challenge of going from one season to the next is adapting from a situation where they fulfilled one specialized role, into a season-long scenario where they have to merge the skillsets of all six players on an indoor court.

“As the setter on an indoor court I’m constantly running towards the net, but now playing defense, I have to see the ball, wait and go to the ball,” said junior Julie Consani, UCLA’s assist-leader in the most recent women’s volleyball season. “The role is completely changed, I have to hit now and be a hitter instead of a setter.”

But even as sand volleyball begins to gain some traction as its own sport, and the number of sand-only volleyball players at UCLA increases over the years, the indoor/sand hybrid players aren’t a dying breed. Metzger said he expects the trend of having athletes who compete in both and indoor level to continue, especially in a location like Southern California.

“There’s always going to be some special athletes that come down the pipe that can do both really well,” Metzger said. “Some of those people are going to want to win a championship in both indoor and sand. I think UCLA is one of those unique places where they’re going to be able to do that.”

The athlete who wishes to bridge the gap between indoor and sand needs to look no further than two of the coaches who run the sand volleyball team, Metzger and assistant coach Jenny Johnson Jordan who both won national championships with their respective UCLA indoor teams before transitioning to successful beach volleyball careers that included competition at the Olympics.

“The fact that I could play for two Olympians and learn from them every day was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up,” Weaver said. “I was actually looking at other schools to play indoor and had other indoor offers, however, no coaching staff even compared to Stein and Jenny.”