An Unlikely Beach Volleyball Hall of Fame Inductee

My induction speech

I am very honored to be here tonight. I’m both honored and surprised. Living in Virginia my entire life and rarely attending events here in California, I’m probably the least known inductee. When I got the email that said, "Congratulations," I thought it was spam. Since it wasn't asking for money and didn't include a link to steal my password, I figured it must be legitimate.

I firmly believe that God gives you certain abilities, puts you in the right places, and puts the right people in your life to help you succeed. The apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the church in Ephesus, “For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago." (Ephesians 2:10, NLT)

Tim and his wife Lynn have been my biggest supporters and promoters since the very beginning. I doubt that I’d be here tonight without them. Tim worked many years as a media delegate for the FIVB and made sure to include match previews from BVBInfo in the packets that were available. However, his support and friendship has extended past just beach volleyball. Five years after meeting him, my mother-in-law was diagnosed with ALS, only to find out that Tim’s sister was the Colorado director of the ALS Association. She helped us tremendously at a time when the disease was often misdiagnosed. That’s God, not coincidence.

There’s also another person who’s been with BVBInfo since its early days, Doug Strauss. Many of you know him or have seen him working with the media or coordinating statistics at the AVP events. He enters all the teams and records all the results and stats for the AVP events into BVBInfo as well as writes almost all of the player bios on the site. BVBInfo wouldn't be the same without Doug.

Of course, I’d like to thank my family, my wife Lisa, my daughter Liz, and my son Dennis who couldn’t be here tonight because his wife is a week and a half overdue for their second child. They’ve put up with all the time I spent building and maintaining the site for almost 30 years - especially in the early years when Lisa call the computer, "my mistress."

There are many others who have helped and supported me over the years, but first, I’d like to share the story of how BVBInfo came about.

I’m probably the least likely person to be a fan of beach volleyball. When I grew up in the ‘70s, volleyball in Virginia was exclusively a girl’s sport in school. The only time I played was in gym class. It didn't resemble what true volleyball should look like. There would be six to twelve players on each side, and the most aggressive boys would weave in and out of the others and hit the ball over the net like a game of tennis. We had no coaching. Three hits on a side wasn’t a strategy; it was simply two more chances to get the ball over the net when it wasn’t hit hard enough.

Watching the 1984 men’s Olympic team win the gold medal sparked my love for the sport. However, I didn’t know anything about beach volleyball until 1986 while in college. Like all college students, I stayed up late, and Tuesday nights at midnight Prime Ticket would show the AVP with Chris Marlowe and Paul Sunderland. I’d watch every week to see who Sinjin and Randy were going to play in the finals next. They were in 22 of 24 finals in 1986, winning 17.

I loosely followed the sport as best as I could for the next ten years. There were very few volleyball magazines to be found in Virginia. Then in 1996, God put me in the right place, working in Baltimore where I found the AVP’s Tour Guide and Yearbook at a newsstand. It had their very complex ranking formula explained. I’d always loved to do rankings. I'd done college football rankings since high school, starting with a calculator and paper. So I started doing my own AVP rankings on Geocities. I got the results from the Volleyball Worldwide site, run by the late Tom Jack. That site also had player profile pages and a few years of results, so I thought, how great it would be to find all the results from the past. Since managing databases and building web apps is what I do for a living, I got this crazy idea to build something and provide it for the fans.

The AVP sent me a list of their winners, and on June 2, 1999, BVBDB.com was launched. I soon realized that was a terrible name with all five letters that sounded alike, and I changed it to BVBInfo. It started with a meager 144 player pages, all from the AVP.

So, I got busy doing research. Chris Marlowe sent me a list of tournament winners dating back to 1948 that he compiled with the late Joe Jares. John Kessel at USAV Volleyball put me in touch with Tim who sent his entire collection of volleyball magazines and all the records from the WPVA. I still have a few I’m looking for, so if you have some from 82-86, please see me. The late Artie Couvillon was working on his Sands of Times books and sent me an extensive list of results for most events. I talked to many former players on the phone to fill in missing information.

This year, the site reached a couple of significant milestones – 25,000 players and 10,000 player photographs. Player photos by far take the most time. One thing I’ve not been able to do is include myself in the database. Maybe next year if the AVP plays in Virginia Beach again, I can convince Phil Dalhausser to play with me.

Others I’d like to thank are Al Lau and the late Dave Williams of the AVP, Richard Baker of the FIVB, Sean Scott and USA Volleyball, the over 100 photographers who have provided player photos with Ken Delgado and the late Ed Chan providing over 1200 combined, and of course the players themselves. If you read my post on Phil Collin who passed earlier this year, he reminded me that BVBInfo was a "labor of love" when my server was getting shut down and I needed to find a new one. That was the kick in the pants I needed to keep me going.

The database behind BVBInfo has allowed me to do other things for the sport: providing information for the FIVB media guides, writing its semi-final and medal match notes, helping at the World Championships from 2005-2019 and the Olympic Games in 2012, and writing the match notes for the 2016 Games. Listening to the streams of the Games from Rio and hearing my notes used on the air was my gold medal. I also provided web pages for the AVP and ran the AVP’s fantasy contest in 2005, which I believe was won by Kevin Wong’s grandmother.

Running BVBInfo has also changed my life in many ways, many of which are not so glamorous. When the FIVB played in Asia or Australia, it meant getting up at 2 or 3AM to write medal match notes or sometimes having to pull over on vacation while driving to write match notes.

However, my goal here tonight goes beyond telling my story. You’ve heard how unlikely it was for me to be here, so I want to encourage you to get involved. God provides talents and abilities to help you succeed. Thinking back to those words by the apostle Paul, have you ever thought of yourself as God's masterpiece? How he created all of us uniquely? That He planned good things for us long ago? Whether it’s playing beach volleyball, building a web site with scores and stats, or contributing in other ways to anything you're passionate about, get out and get involved. Who knows, maybe you'll end up being an unlikely Hall of Fame inductee.