Project Summary
As an avid beach volleyball player I was disappointed to find a serious lack of well-organized play when I moved to Charlotte. I wanted to help fill this void but didn’t have nearly enough capital to consider starting a venue of any kind. My solution ended up being to rent courts from the Parks Department and hold my tournaments every few weekends utilizing their existing facilities.
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Additional Info
I faced a myriad of issues at the onset, first and foremost was court availability. Dealing with the Parks Department was easy enough but I also didn’t want to be rude to the people who counted on the city courts to play pickup on the weekends. I decided the best strategy was to hold tournaments every three to four weeks, only use one of the two weekend days and only rent half of the available courts on that day so pickup play could still take place on the others.
After I had worked out the logistics of court rental, I needed to develop a brand for the organization. Both the name and the logo are meant to reinforce the geographic location of the club as well as our main focus. The inspiration for the logo came from the badges and emblems used by English soccer clubs which I felt had the mix of tradition and modernity that I was looking for.
The venue logistics and branding ended up being the easiest part of the entire endeavor. I began accumulating equipment (you don’t need much for beach volleyball, but things like antennas, scoreboards, balls, proper boundary lines get expensive) and working with a few different vendors to create apparel that would be used along with entry fees as prizes. The first year was a great learning experience and helped me refine my strategy and fill some gaps I had missed. By the end of the year I felt confident I could offer top-tier tournaments that were better run than any other competitor in town.
The second summer was when I really hit my stride. I had acquired all of the necessary equipment, formed a good rapport with the Park Department and established a fairly regular schedules that didn’t impeded on park guests who simply wanted to play pickup. I made two major changes to my strategy in the second year. The first was to create a staff of volunteers that could help me prepare the courts, run the tournament and document the play. In exchange they would receive free entry to any of the tournaments throughout the year that they were not scheduled to work at. The second change was to pay our 100% of the entry fees to the top level division to draw a higher level of play. This in turn meant an increase in apparel to be handed out as prizes for the lower divisions.
Eventually, the financial cost of the endeavor (and the fact that I rarely got to play in my own tournaments due to logistics) caused me to suspend tournaments after the 2016 season and scale back the group into a place where players could organize simple pickup play. However, I consider Queen City Beach to be one of my proudest accomplishments for several reasons; the trajectory of our membership and participation over the course of two seasons, the level of interest during our premier tournament that saw teams travel in from Raleigh, Greenville, SC and Winston Salem, and the number of new players we introduced to the game of beach volleyball…all on a shoestring budget with a public park as our venue.