AVP DASHBOARD

AVP Tour commissioner Donald Sun talks about establishing professional beach volleyball events across America in a Q & A session with DiG

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INTERVIEW BY CONNOR HASTINGS

DiG: When you’re determining what stops will be on the AVP schedule for the upcoming season, how do you select sites for consideration? Sun: We’re mainly looking to hold tournaments in major markets that resonate nationally and appeal to our sponsors and broadcast partner (NBC). Big cities make sense demographically and economically, so we want to have tournaments in every major market in the U.S. We also want to make sure the event makes sense for the host city itself.

What’s the process of getting approval and selecting the site for an event like? We’re very deliberate in speaking with city representatives, sports commissions, and local officials so they can understand what we’re bringing to the table in terms of the entertainment value we bring and the impact we can have on the community. We try to get the city involved as much as possible. Scheduling the AVP New York event for this season was an eight month long process of talking to the city and getting everyone on board.

We don’t want to come in like a circus, where we just get a permit, have the event, and then leave. We want to have a lasting impact on the area and build relationships. That includes our junior programming and AVP Next events, which get more local players involved. Determining where to have the tournament site also takes time, and we rely on the people that live there and government officials to understand foot traffic patterns and other factors, because it’s a mutual benefit for them and us to pick a good spot.

In May you held an event in New Orleans for the first time in over fifteen years. Were you pleased with how the event turned out? I thought we had a great turnout for year one in New Orleans, especially considering the weather. And you can’t expect to have Manhattan Beach level crowds in an event’s first year. The people in New Orleans and Kenner were very dedicated to making the event happen. When I got to the site Friday morning after the big thunderstorm there were all kinds of people from the city already there, shoveling and blow drying, putting down hay, laying down tarp to make the courts playable and the site walkable for fans. If it wasn’t for the fact that we were mutually collaborating with the city from day one and getting their support, that may not have happened.

What are some different ideas you’re looking at to improve the experience at AVP tournaments? Sponsor village could be more interactive, and we’re looking at incorporating food trucks into the picture, just creating more of an interactive feel in general. Finding places where you can serve alcohol is important. We’re also looking at incorporating a music component and enhancing our VIP experience.

Most AVP tournaments are now 16-team events as opposed to 32-team events. What’s the reasoning behind that? If you’re the one that’s writing the checks, it makes no sense to have a 32-team tourney from a cost perspective and a competition perspective, because the teams coming out of the qualifier aren’t elite teams. No one really wants to see the 5th seed playing the 28th seed. With a 16-team draw, you have elite players playing against elite players right off the bat, and you’re not wasting anyone’s time.

What’s the advantage of extending AVP events from two days to three days and spreading out the competition schedule? We’ve shrunk the number of courts down to four so that there’s no longer a sea of courts that you have to navigate through. We condensed it in order for the fans to navigate the grounds more efficiently. With three days and four courts, fans have every opportunity to find the matches they want to watch and enjoy.

A lot of players and fans have expressed hopes that the AVP season schedule would be announced earlier in the year. Is that something that can be improved? That really depends on the collaboration with the FIVB to understand what their World Tour schedule looks like. Although sometimes unavoidable, we try to avoid scheduling on top of their events in the spirit of working together. Typically, we already know the potential dates for the AVP schedule ahead of time. We just always wait for the FIVB schedule to finalize first, and then we adjust accordingly.

How do you evaluate whether a particular AVP event was successful? The main things we look at are: Did we make our sponsors happy? Did we make the fans happy? Are the sponsors going to re-up? We don’t really evaluate things based on the financial results of a single event, we’re looking more at the big picture, and making sure we did everything we could to make the sponsors and fans happy.

Category: AVP News, Fun

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