New beach rules could be game-changers

It’s harder than people think to set a trend in Southern California. Take the quest to establish beach tennis at, well, the beach.

Five years ago, a small group of South Bay tennis pros picked up the sport, a cross between beach volleyball and regular tennis that has long been popular in South America and Europe.

“It’s a natural,” says Donny Young, a Hermosa Beach early adapter, who heard about the sport from a fellow tennis pro, who had learned it from a European player. “Easier than tennis, easier than volleyball, you’ve got the sand and water and sun, and it’s inclusive.” Within a few months, Young says, he had regular matches and friends and onlookers were clamoring to play.

But since 2008, Young and his fellow enthusiasts have been struggling to find spots on Los Angeles County beaches where they can reliably volley their extra-light balls and swing their extra-short racquets. The reason? A combination of old rules and new competition for coastal space. 

“Beach tennis is just one piece of it,” says Kerry Silverstrom, chief deputy director of the Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors. Beach attendance, she notes, has risen to record levels during the past five years. According to the latest figures from the county fire department’s lifeguard division, some 50 million people so far have come to the county beaches during the 2010-11 fiscal year, even with the chilly weather that dampened attendance last summer; that’s more than a 25% increase over 2005-06 beach attendance.

Part of it has to do with the economy, which has kept locals close to home during summer vacations, she says, but part is simply population growth and California lifestyle.

Ask Silverstrom to elaborate, and she’ll offer a litany of the many interests that, in recent years, have come to vie ever more intensely with swimmers and sunbathers for space on the county’s 80 or so miles of coastline: beach soccer, beach volleyball, surfers, bodyboarders, skimboarders, paddle boarders, hang gliders, kiteboarders, surf skiers, triathletes, bicyclists, filmmakers, surf camps, boot camps, cheerleading camps, day camps, weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, memorial ceremonies—“you name it,” she says. And that’s not including the non-human beachgoers from grunion to protected shorebirds who can’t be disturbed in their roosts.

As a result, the county’s Beach Commission and the Department of Beaches and Harbors have been working on an overhaul of the county’s beach ordinance, a wide-ranging set of new rules expected to come before the Board of Supervisors in a couple of months.

The idea, says Silverstrom, is to make the existing ordinance more flexible and inclusive. “Most of its sections,” she says, “have been in place since 1969.” 

Rules about watercraft and beach ball sizes are being reconsidered, she says, as are special requests from the film industry and other important economic interests.

“It’s a balancing act, though,” she says, laughing. For example, a recommendation giving beach authorities leeway to give certain privileges to film crews—letting them drive on the sand under certain circumstances or launch personal water craft from the sand that are otherwise banned from operation within 300 yards of the shoreline—had to be rethought when the beach they had in mind turned out to be home to the threatened snowy plover.

Few have followed the give and take more closely, however, than the beach tennis constituents.

Popular for at least 30 years on the beaches of South America and Europe, beach tennis is played on the sand by 2-person teams who volley a soft, low-pressure ball over a high net. Players wear board shorts and bikinis; polite tennis applause is less common than rock music. 

The sport began to garner publicity in the U.S. when a New York real estate developer began promoting it in 2005 on Long Island. Young and other local enthusiasts say the sport spread to Southern California when South Bay tennis pro Joe Testa took it up and recruited Young and another tennis pro, Marty Salokas, the following year.

By 2008, beach tennis had enough West Coast players to justify a tournament and some media attention. “But once the tournament was over, there was nothing,” says Salokas. “It just didn’t have the grass roots here.”

So the group began putting up flyers, sending out emails and—crucially—organizing meets on South Bay beaches, using vacant beach volleyball areas or portable nets and equipment that they would buy from the East Coast promoters and set up in the sand themselves.

The impromptu courts worked well in some spots—Hermosa Beach, for example. “But anyone who tried to play in Manhattan or Redondo or El Segundo or other places was told, ‘Hey, you just can’t set that up anywhere you want’,” Salokas says.

Moreover, they discovered that the existing beach ordinance makes it illegal to throw, kick or roll anything on the sand that is smaller or denser than a 10-inch inflatable rubber playground ball. So the group began lobbying beach cities and the county for an exception.

They scored in Hermosa, where last year two beach tennis courts were designated by the city. But Lucy Streeter, a private swim instructor and former professional high diver from Rancho Palos Verdes who helped organize the grassroots efforts, says their pleas to the county initially got lost in the larger beach ordinance revision. So several months ago, the group launched a petition drive and a letter writing campaign. 

Now, officials say, they are definitely on the radar, and stand to benefit from the new rules, if they are approved later this summer.

“We have staff currently looking for locations where we might put a permanent beach tennis court or two,” says Silverstrom, suggesting Malibu’s Zuma Beach or Dockweiler State Beach near Marina del Rey.

That’s good news to people like Streeter, a mother of three who took up the sport because it seemed so easy. 

“The hardest part about it,” she says, “has been finding a place to play.”

 Posted 6/15/11