Beach Volleyball is growing on the central coast.
Cuesta College's Beach and Indoor Volleyball Head Coach Whitney Meyer and her beach volleyball team are the newest addition to the list of athletic programs at the school; a decision that has been in the works for a long time.
“To be a competitive [indoor] program, we really needed to have that beach experience in order to recruit the top level athletes. They want to play both,” Meyer said.
Meyer, who’s coached in the Indoor Volleyball program since 2017, finally got her wish at the end of this past fall, getting approved to start a beach program.
“[The indoor team] pretty much jumped up and down and cheered," Meyer recalled.
Players like former St. Joseph standout, Bailey Woodside, had played recreationally with their main focus on indoor. Others like Alexis Waltz had played competitively growing up in Pismo Beach. Templeton's Remy Campbell was playing in a women's league with no prior beach experience. For everyone however, it is a learning curve.
“Beach is just really about outlasting and outsmarting the opponent," Woodside explained. "It’s a big difference [from indoor].”
“It's definitely hard getting used to new sport, but now we're just having fun and working on our skills,” Campbell added.
Even the coaches have had to brush up on what it takes to mold a successful beach program.
“It's kind of exciting to learn something new and be re-energized as a coach,” Meyer admitted. She has been with the program for a decade as both a player and coach seeing right away that there was a need for a beach volleyball program that in turn would help boost the indoor program.
“Taking all of the skills we learned out here into indoor will make us a better have a better season next year," Waltz explained. "There's going to be a lot of good that comes from it.”
Right now there are 48 community colleges in the state that offer beach volleyball. San Luis Obiso County and north Santa Barbara County, there are ten high school programs since the sport became a CIF- sanctioned sport in 2021.
"Seeing that program in high school come up is super cool because it gets girls into it before and then they realize even if you can't play indoor in college beach is another really fun opportunity to do after high school,“ Woodside said.
“It's definitely been great to see the trend in the Central Coast and I'm really excited to have Cuesta as another option for them to continue to play after high school,” Meyer concluded.
Due to excessive rain, Cuesta's beach volleyball courts are drying out. The program is also in the midst of their inaugural fundraiser to help with the program's needs.
