Volleyball tour works to spike money concerns

The Assn. of Volleyball Professionals has a new look this year — a new sponsor, new colors and a new management team — but arrives in Huntington Beach this week with some of the same old problems.

Financial uncertainty has plagued the professional beach volleyball tour for more than a decade and the AVP has been scrambling to stay afloat ever since filing for bankruptcy in 1998. But this year seems worse than the others.

Despite skin-care company Nivea’s taking over as title sponsor of the tour, the number of tournaments is down to 12 and prize money is $2.7 million. Just two years ago, when title sponsor Crocs was pumping out cash, those numbers were 18 tournaments and $4 million in prize money.

But Crocs fell victim to the national economic downturn and pulled out of its sponsorship deal after last year with two years remaining on the contract, putting this season in jeopardy. Nivea stepped in and changed the tour’s color to blue from yellow and now hopes the tour can change the color of its bottom line from red to black.

“It was really challenging over the off-season,” said Jason Hodell, who took over as CEO after former CEO-Commissioner Leonard Armato left the tour last year. “I can’t tell you how relieved we were when Nivea decided to join the AVP tour.”

Hodell did not want to disclose the terms of the deal with Nivea, stating only that it is filled with “complexities that give both sides outs” if they are not happy. Hodell did acknowledge, however, that the tour would be operating in the red this season, as it has for most of the past decade.

That is a problem of which Mike Dodd is growing weary. Dodd, a star player in the AVP’s heyday from the late 1980s to the mid-’90s, took over as AVP commissioner this year. He said it would take patience, but that he sees a day when the AVP can run as a profitable business.

“We just have to have strict, hard and fast financial budgets and stick to them,” Dodd said. “I think everyone is tired of operating in a deficit. I think everyone is tired of year after year looking for new sponsors.”

Hodell said the tour had agreed to a deal with a “fitness and nutrition company” that would be announced this weekend during the Huntington Beach Open, which begins Friday near the Huntington Beach Pier.

That’s a start, and the added exposure the tour will get from its new television deal with ESPN and ABC should help attract long-term sponsors, but cost-cutting is also in vogue for the AVP.

The tour recently moved its offices to Torrance, out of fancy offices at Howard Hughes Center in West L.A., and is saving about 75% in leasing costs, Hodell said.

Players were guaranteed $4 million in prize money according to terms of their collective bargaining agreement, but have consented to the smaller purses to help the tour.

“I think maybe the past few years the tour was a little overextended,” said Jennifer Kessy, who won five times on the AVP tour last season. “Instead of spreading out the resources into so many tournaments, why not just cut back and make the ones that we do have into great events?”

The financial difficulties, Kessy said, are troubling, but it’s nothing she hasn’t heard before.

“I’ve been playing a long time and every year it seems like we hear the same thing about how the tour is having a hard time,” she said. “And every year things seems to work out just fine. We have confidence in the people running the tour, they always seem to find a way.”

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