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If San Diego Is Eden Of Sport, Why Are Top Players, Teams Banished?
San Diego Union-Tribune
Dec. 12, 2001
By Mark Zeigler SAN DIEGO - Terry Liskevych became coach of the U.S. women's national volleyball team after the 1984 Olympics and moved to its training base in San Diego. He figured he had arrived in volleyball nirvana. Liskevych came here from Stockton, where he coached the University of the Pacific women's team and where the Tigers had led the nation in attendance. Now he was moving to San Diego, a place with a history of volleyball success at all levels, a place with perfect weather and miles of beaches and dozens of gyms, a place with a volleyball-literate populace appreciative of the sport's nuances. The women's national team scheduled an exhibition match at 5,000-seat Peterson Gym at San Diego State. "I remember thinking, 'I hope we have enough seats in there,' " Liskevych says. They did. Liskevych arrived for the match, and scattered across the bleachers were a few hundred people -- a thousand tops. Welcome to San Diego. Welcome to volleyball in San Diego. "It took me a few years to figure it out," says Liskevych, who retired as national coach in 1996, "but I came to realize that's just the way it is here." The NCAA women's Final Four comes to SDSU's Cox Arena tomorrow and Saturday, and officials have worked hard since last summer selling tickets to the county's thousands of youth and adult players. They're expecting crowds of 10,000 each day. Cox Arena should be rocking. Don't be deceived. It's not always like this. It should be, you'd think. On paper, San Diego should be the sport's mecca in this country, a place where you can play for a top youth club, win a state high school championship, compete for the NCAA championship and then transition to the Olympic team or professional beach tour -- all without leaving the city limits. And for a while, you could. The youth programs have always been strong. And the city's lone NCAA Division I championship was won by the San Diego State men's volleyball team in 1973. And SDSU went to the Final Four in each of the first two years women had an NCAA tournament. And both men's and women's national teams were based here in the 1980s and '90s, winning two gold and two bronze medals in the Olympics. And Mariners Point was one of the hottest stops on the beach tour. And now? SDSU dropped its men's program last year. The SDSU women haven't been past the Sweet 16 in the NCAA tournament since 1982, and USD, while building a top-25 women's program, has never been past the second round. Both national teams left for the volleyball, ahem, hotbed of Colorado Springs in 1997. The tentative 2002 schedule for the beach tour has stops in Muskegan, Mich., and Belmar, N.J. -- and none in San Diego. "I think it's the same as any other sport in San Diego," says Ken Grosse, the associate athletic director at UCSD who was the marketing and events director for USA Volleyball. "It's just a soft market. There's just too many things to do here, and volleyball is just one of those things. "You've got to have something that's really big to draw anyone's attention." The result is a bizarre dichotomy, a volleyball market with an invisible net cutting through it. A pristine beach, and a desert. On one side you have ridiculously fertile ground for youth players, a talent pool that Liskevych rates in the top three nationally with Los Angeles/Orange County and Chicago. You have the Starlings Volleyball Clubs USA, which began in San Diego in 1995 as a means to expose the sport to inner-city girls and now has affiliates in more than 30 cities. You have a booming high school sport, with Bonita Vista High last year winning the county's first state title in the girls large-school division, with 62 schools fielding boys teams barely a decade after the first CIF-San Diego Section championship. You have 34 women's players from San Diego on the 64 teams in this year's NCAA tournament. On the other side is the local college and professional scene, barren by comparison. The SDSU men's program was a casualty of departmentwide budget cuts, and USD has never had one. The SDSU women's team, which primarily plays at Peterson Gym, drew 3,409 fans to its 12 home matches this season -- total. Three women's teams averaged more than that per game, topped by Hawaii at 6,514. SDSU and USD played each other twice this season. Attendance: 352 and 432. Nebraska hosted rival Oklahoma in October. Attendance: 8,976. The men's national team moved to San Diego in 1981, and the women came here four years later. Their departures in 1997 were largely a function of politics within USA Volleyball, the sport's national governing body, but some spread the blame to the city and county, which did little to keep them. The teams practiced in the old Federal Building in Balboa Park until it was condemned and ultimately refurbished to house the Hall of Champions. Without a regular place to train, USA Volleyball announced a national search in 1992 for a permanent home that would unite its administrative offices (in Colorado Springs) and national teams (in San Diego) -- "a national volleyball capital," in their words. After three years, it reached a decision: The teams would stay in San Diego and play in a $4 million gymnasium to be built with a grant from a philanthropic organization. That fell through, and in December 1996 the federation voted 11-10 to move the teams to Colorado Springs. "Part of volleyball's problem is that the sport has been poorly promoted both at the national level and local level," says Don Patterson, executive editor of Volleyball Magazine and a Carlsbad resident. "The national teams never did a great job letting people know that the teams were here. It was this big secret. "If you took a poll on the street after they left, I think you'd find that very few people even knew they trained here. And they were training here when they were winning (Olympic) medals." Meantime, volleyball was undergoing a fundamental shift, a sort of reverse migration from California to points east. In 1988, the tournament's eighth year, Texas became the first school outside California or Hawaii to win an NCAA women's title. In the men's tournament, around since 1970, it took 29 years before Brigham Young broke California's hold on the trophy. The transformation was complete last year, when, for the first time, both men's (BYU) and women's (Nebraska) champions were from outside the state. The national teams began noticing this when they'd pack arenas in Kalamazoo, Mich., and Syracuse, N.Y., and Hershey, Pa., while drawing only a few thousand in Southern California. This season, only three California schools rank in the top 25 in average attendance for NCAA women's programs. Northern Iowa is 14th and Montana State 20th . . . ahead of UCLA, USC and both San Diego schools. "This has been a topic of discussion over the years, and no one has come up with a solution," says Charlie Jackson, a San Diego resident who operates the volleyhut.com Web site that sells equipment and apparel. "It's just the reality of it. It's not something unique to San Diego. You can get a town gripped by something if there's not much else going on." So volleyball in San Diego chugs along. The clubs and high schools continue to crank out fabulous players, and then they leave to play college or pro. Take Bonita Vista High's Jennifer Saleaumua, a 5-foot-11 outside hitter who was the national prep Player of the Year in 2000. She orally committed to Arizona, then signed a letter of intent with Hawaii, then didn't enroll after questions about her academic qualifications. Now she's planning to go elsewhere. Nebraska reportedly is at the top of her list.
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