Association of Volleyball Professionals

And I had a Leonard Armato was, he was the Shaquille O'Neal's like kind of agent, Lisa Leslie running a lot.

He, he kind of brought back volleyball and created the AVP and brought it back, back in the 80s.

And I was the director of sponsorship there.

And he used to always say, we'd sign a deal, whether it be me or someone else, he'd always say, don't rest on your laurels.

And to even, you know, use it in a different way.

Like I've seen I've seen AVP played in Honda Center.

And just again, these are pro venues at both Honda and crypto that have the capabilities to create first class entertainment.

And I think that's fantastic for Major League Volleyball.

Is it cool for you to see, I mean, you got Troy Field.

He doesn't wear the pink hat so much anymore, but younger guys still on the AVP rocking the pink hat or getting into the game because I saw Karch do this and I want to do this because of Karch.

And every time when I'm commentating on VBTV and someone hits that little baby cut, like that's the Karch cut.

I laugh because I started that pink hat as a total superstition.

And so my hope would be that And beach volleyball has had some capital also come into it.

And I'm not at this point familiar with the intimate details, but as more and more legitimate investors come in and deep pockets come in, I think the better the chance that beach volleyball will find a winning or a sustainable and hopefully thriving formula.

I'm skeptical certainly about things like And again, I'm not intimately familiar with it, but like on the AVP where teams represent a city.

During my time, people didn't come to see a city.

sure so i was born in manasquan new jersey at the jersey shore and i uh you know cut my teeth in the water here at the jersey shore learning how to surf and bodyboard and be a lifeguard and all these things you do growing up at the shore and then i had moved to hawaii after high school to pursue a water sports career and i was successful after about a year of trying to make it in hawaii and competing in hawaii i got a sponsor to go internationally and compete on the world tour.

And I did that for about a decade while also doing water safety gigs for events all over California, Hawaii, East Coast, even for different things like the AVP, which is the volleyball tour.

They had some water sports involvement as part of their programming, and I handled that.

I learned event logistics.

All right, we got OLW White.

Do we have any more information about the AVP's newly announced sponsorships? Are Gatorade, Delta, and Corona, each sponsoring for five years and 100 million, That would be cool.

That'd be great.

Proving the league experiment a success, or are we just getting a couple free cases and a flight or two next year, meaning we're in our customary state of financial limbo? I don't know any information about the sponsors.

I don't think it's free cases and a flight or two either.

I wrote about this as the sponsor started getting announced.

I wrote about it a while ago that while I don't know the information, One thing I do know about the AVP is that they stopped taking small deals.

Whereas before, pretty much for as long as I've been a player, the beach volleyball ecosystem would take basically anything.

Yeah.

What's next? You obviously have tried AVP once before.

I have.

I've dabbled a little bit.

Matt Ferbringer was the assistant coach for the indoor team at the Tokyo Olympics.

And I got off the plane coming home from my first professional season in Poland.

And he texts me and says, hey, do you have any interest in playing AVP in Manhattan? Yeah.

Because their season is after y'all's?

Let me read this correctly.

There is the Association of Volleyball Professionals, which is also AVP.

It's

not that AVP.