You get a funny look at the human psyche when you run a volleyball tournament, especially when you run a “draw” tournament, where playing partners are drawn randomly from a hat. Almost everyone worries about how they’ll play, how they look in a swim suit, will they disappoint their partner. Like any sport, you can have good days and bad days and I’m sure there’s much of the same before a tennis tournament or a team golf tournament.
Last weekend, it was the beach volleyball crew’s turn at Main Beach for the Fall Classic doubles draw. The Fall Classic, and its sister tournament, the Spring Classic, are city-sponsored doubles tournaments open to everyone. The highest division, the “A,” attracts some of the best local and regional amateurs, and the “B” gets the up-and-comers, the never-gonnas and the wily old masters.
I experimented this year with a draw format, where partners are paired from a higher and lower seeded group and then you play with them throughout the tournament, but I think I’m going back to the “King and Queen of the Beach” format, where you play a round robin with different partners and win points individually, which then seeds you into the playoffs. Everyone seems to like having their tournament destiny in their own hands better and it’s a much more social format, which is a big part of what beach volleyball is all about, aside from the whole exercise/competition thing. But the round robin can be fickle because the luck of the draw can give you an easy set of matches with good partners or a bad one. Inevitably the cream rises to the top, but it makes for some interesting pairings.
