NCAA Beach Volleyball Championship May 1-3 at Gulf Shores Public Beach

NCAA Beach Volleyball Championship May 1-3 at Gulf Shores Public Beach

Gulf Shores will continue to host sport’s premiere event at least through 2031

By Fran Thompson

Fourth seeded Southern Cal, which has won six titles in the tourney’s nine year history, plays No. 13 Texas A&M Corpus Christi to open the 2026 NCAA Beach Volleyball Championship on Friday, May 1 at 9 a.m. at Gulf Shores Public Beach in front of the Hangout.
Six other first round matches in the single-elimination tourney will follow before Cal Poly plays first time participant Tulane at 4 p.m. Tulane is making its first appearance in the tournament.
The entire tourney will be televised live across the ESPN networks. Tickets are available at eventbrite. com or at the gate.
Quarterfinal and semifinal duals will be played on May 2 and the remaining two teams will play for the the national championship on Sunday, May 3 beginning at 11:30 a.m.
Texas Christian, the reigning champion after defeating Loyola Marymount 3-2 in last year’s national title match, goes into the tourney as a 10th seed and plays a championship re-match against the 7th seed Lions at 2 p.m. in the first round.
The field was selected from the 104 NCAA institutions sponsoring teams and includes eight teams conference qualifiers and eight at-large from across the country. All 16 teams were then seeded.
After six years in Gulf Shores, The tourney was scheduled to move to Huntington Beach for two years beginning in 2025 until returning to Gulf Shores. But that city backed out to open up housing opportunities for people working to restore neighborhoods destroyed by wildfires that leveled two beach towns to its south and Gulf Shores added those two years to secure the tourney at least through 2031.
Gulf Shores and Gulf Shores & Orange Beach Tourism support the tourney financially and have made no secret their desire to make the city synonymous with NCAA beach volleyball, similar to Oklahoma City (Softball College World Series) and Omaha (Baseball College World Series).
In addition to its $1.5 million economic impact, the tourney helps Gulf Shores build its brand as a safe & wholesome family vacation destination. NCAA beach volleyball is the only collegiate national championship held in Alabama that is broadcast each year on national TV.
“Hosting a championship is a huge deal,” said Shawn Weaver, director of the Pleasure Island Volleyball Club (PIVC), which has played a major role in growing beach volleyball in coastal Alabama.
Thanks to Weaver and fellow USA Volleyball Gulf Coast director Phillip Bryant, the American Volleyball Coaches Association brought its sand volleyball national championships to Pleasure Island from 2012-2015, helping establish Gulf Shores as the nation’s home collegiate beach volleyball. A year later, the NCAA sanctioned beach volleyball as its 90th championship sport.
“It was the perfect marriage of timing, vision and resources,” recalled Kathy DeBoer, who was executive director of the American Volleyball Coaches Association.
In April 2012, Pepperdine won the inaugural AVCA Collegiate Sand (not beach) Volleyball National Championship in Gulf Shores. CBS Sports broadcast the initial contests.
AVCA powers had gathered for a pseudo-championship tourney in San Diego in August of 2011. But the following spring, during that first championship weekend in Gulf Shores, the sport’s guiding forces saw how the venue, the weather, the sand, the sponsors and multiple hosts could work in sync to create an event that fit perfectly what Gulf Shores was looking for as its springtime answer to October’s National Shrimp Fest.
The weekend was the antithesis of the Hangout Fest, which came two weeks later at the same location.
As the story goes, that first national tourney would not have come to Gulf Shores if Southern Cal president Max Nikias did not nix it on his campus because he did not want trucks dropping loads of sand on Trojan greenspace.
Bryant and Weaver already knew most of the AVCA coaches. Bryant coached at UAB, one of the first schools in the nation to sponsor a beach program.
DeBoer, a world class athlete herself and coach Nina Matthies of Pepperdine first broached the idea of bringing the tourney to Gulf Shores with Bryant and Weaver.
Presented with the opportunity to host the best college beach volleyball players in the nation, Volleyball Gulf Coast’s board stepped into the void that Southern Cal left and started building the symbiotic relationships between volleyball associations, volunteers, The City of Gulf Shores, coaches, fans and players that remain strong today.
DeBoer, a former volleyball coach at Kentucky and the executive director of the American Volleyball Coaches Association,cajoled CBS Sports into covering the 2011 tourney on tape delay.
The Hangout Restaurant Group stepped up to sponsor the tourney banquet and the hospitality tent. Orange Beach/Gulf Shores Tourism paid for a $15K media buy.
The City of Gulf Shores kicked in $30K and helped with everything from security to labor to clean-up, according to Bryant.
But it was left for USA Volleyball Gulf Coast, already committed to coordinating volunteers, officials and most of the tourney’s logistics, to commit the money to make the tourney happen.
“It was well over $95K (to put the tourney together). But we had been good stewarts with our money. We had reserve funds and we were not going to let it go down,’’ Bryant said.
Bryant said the tourney committee went all out with swag bags for players, and spent $20K just on apparel for its volunteers and officials.
“We threw the biggest party they had ever been to,’’ Bryant said. “It took a long time to amortize that money, but if it had not been for the infusion of funds from the Gulf Coast Region, that tourney would have been one and done.’’
Pepperdine was crowned champion in 2012, and coach Matthies, the Bear Bryant of the sport at the time, said the beaches in Gulf Shores were the nicest she had ever seen when she accepted the championship trophy on behalf of her team.
The AVCA Championship was under no obligation to return to Gulf Shores in 2013, but the coaches and players were treated so well during that first year that they did come back.
Gulf Shores Mayor Robert Craft has from the beginning has said the tourney should be part of the city’s family vacation destination brand, and the tourney has been back where it belongs every May (save Covid year) since.