When it's cold outside, you can bring the beach inside with the sport of volleyball.
The AVP Crocs Hot Winter Nights beach volleyball tour makes three stops in Wisconsin in January.
On Jan. 17, the tour will be at the Bradley Center at 7 p.m. It will then head out state with a stop at Madison at 7:30 p.m. on Jan. 18 and La Crosse at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 19.
The tour features participants from top-ranked AVP men's and women's players on a rotational basis (four players per gender per event) and replicates the authentic Southern California beach party atmosphere featured at a typical AVP Crocs Tour Event.
Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh emerged as the marquee female volleyball players during the last Olympics and form the top women's team on the tour. Nicole Branaugh and Elaine Youngs are ranked second.
Phil Dalhausser and Todd Rogers form the top ranked men's team. Mike Lambert and Stein Metzger are the second-ranked team.
These top-ranked players are not scheduled to make the Wisconsin leg of the tour. Matt Fuerbringer, a member of the sixth ranked team on the tour, will compete here and is getting ready for cold weather.
"When I played in Austria, rather than lug around all these winter coats, I would wear a sweat shirt and a big jacket and just sprint from the taxi to the arena," said Fuerbringer, a native of Costa Mesa, Calif. "I would just grin and bear it until I got inside where it was warm."
Fuerbringer said he asked the AVP to send him to the Wisconsin tour stops because it is one of the few states he has never visited. The format for the winter tour is four men and four women playing until there is one champion for each gender.
Fuerbringer said the men accompanying him to Wisconsin are Jeff Nygaard, John Hyden and Dax Holdren.
Nygaard was a member of the U.S. Olympic team before joining the beach volleyball tour.
Beach volleyball has made stops in Milwaukee before, but the out-state stops will be firsts, especially for the indoor winter tour.
TV commercials for the La Crosse stop have been running for a couple weeks in the region of the state. The event will be held at the La Crosse Center, which previously hosted CBA basketball and indoor football.
This is an Olympic year, so more focus will be put on beach volleyball. It has become one of the more popular spectator sports in the Games.
May-Treanor and Walsh won the Olympic gold medal in 2004 and currently rank first in qualifying points. By winning seven titles out of eight FIVB events last season, May-Treanor and Walsh shot to the top of the list and will essentially be able to cherry-pick from a list of international events in '08 leading up to the Olympic games in August.
No team has repeated as Olympic beach volleyball champion in the short history of the sport (it was first contested in 1996 in Atlanta). Brazil's Emanuel Rego and Ricardo Santos hope to also accomplish the feat. Gold medalists in Athens four years ago, Rego and Santos hold the No. 1 men's Olympic ranking.
The AVP tour has seen growth in crowds at events and on TV. According to the tour Web site: "AVP Pro Beach Volleyball Tour, Inc. is a leading lifestyle sports entertainment company focused on the production, marketing and distribution of professional beach volleyball events worldwide. AVP operates the industry's most prominent national touring series, the AVP Pro Beach Volleyball Tour, which was organized in 1983.
"Featuring more than 150 of the top men and women competitors in the sport, AVP will stage 16 events throughout the United States in 2006. In 2004, AVP athletes successfully represented the United States during the Olympics in Athens, Greece, winning gold and bronze medals, the first medals won by U.S. women in professional beach volleyball."
