Sand Volleyball

Sand Volleyball Rules

The general rules of sand volleyball are mostly identical to those of standard indoor volleyball with a few exceptions: the block is considered the first contact and counted as such, dinks, or fingertip plays to move the ball to the opposite court, are banned by open hand and must be carried out with closed hands or knuckles, no substitutions are allowed, players do not have to rotate position, the serve has a five second time limit, etc. Scoring also varies from program to program.

Sand Volleyball Court

The court of sand volleyball is what distinguishes it as a separate entity. The deep sand surface used for the court may be either from a naturally formed source such as a beach or man-made with sand a foot in depth covering a hard court. The dimensions of each side of the court are 8 by 8 meters, which is smaller than one half of an indoor volleyball court. Detailed instructions for building sand volleyball courts are available online and even provide adjustments for varying climate and sand depth. Issues like net height must be calculated very precisely to meet the specifications of the sand volleyball associations (officially measured from the center of the net and from raked-sand level). Sand and all other necessary materials for building and excavating a sand court with net and posts are available online and elsewhere as well.

Indoor Sand Volleyball

A variation of beach volleyball that is growing in popularity, indoor sand volleyball resolves the problems and features the advantages of both beach volleyball and indoor hard court volleyball. Being indoors, this variation is free of interruption by bad, unpredictable weather conditions, making match scheduling more binding, and, more importantly, because the court is made of sand and not hard flooring, there is a great decrease in player injury, resulting in less liability and optimizing use of team players. Generally, indoor sand volleyball teams range in number from two to six players. Colleges generally have six players. Out of convenience, multipurpose gymnasium basketball courts may be transformed into indoor sand volleyball courts. A recent development in boundary marking is the introduction of lasers that mark the sand in various bright colors. As teams convert from hard floor to sand courts, conditioning must be done to get the players accustomed to playing on sand, which is much different in terms of balancing weight, especially when jumping and running.