"The public can't get to the beach without walking around the courts."
That was Hermosa Beach Mayor Justin Massey, on the record at a city council meeting, describing what July had become on his own beach. He wasn't complaining about a single tournament. He was describing a stretch of sand that had turned into a construction zone of nets, sponsor banners, and stadium seating for the better part of a month, right in front of the homes that make up the Sand Section.
If you live along the Strand or within a few blocks of it, you already know the feeling he was describing. What you might not know is that the city fought about it, lost the argument for a while, and then spent the past two years building an alternative. That alternative lands this month.
How July got to 27 days
Hermosa Beach's relationship with beach volleyball goes back to the 1960s and 70s, when tournaments here helped turn a backyard beach sport into the professional circuit it is today. The city takes real pride in that history. But pride and scheduling logistics don't always cooperate.
By late 2023, city staff had built out a beach volleyball calendar for 2024, 2025, and 2026 that stacked the AVP's amateur bracket, the AVP pro series, and AAU national championships back to back. The result: 24 consecutive days of courts on the sand in July 2024, and 27 consecutive days in both July 2025 and July 2026.
Council members pushed back in the same meeting where that schedule was approved. Councilmember Mike Detoy called it unfair to the public to lock up the whole month. Massey went further, saying flatly that the plan shoved too many events into too little time. Councilmember Dean Francois raised a separate problem: the 2024 slate couldn't include the AVP's Hermosa stop at all, because the tour needed an early July date to avoid colliding with the Paris Olympics, which opened July 26 that year.
The counterargument came from the people who run the tournaments. AAU National Beach Volleyball Director Denny Lennon told the council his event needs a fixed July date every year, because high school volleyball wraps up in June and picks back up in August. July is the only open window that works for junior athletes nationwide. Councilman Raymond Jackson landed somewhere in the middle, telling both sides that Hermosa had earned its reputation as the epicenter of the sport, even if the schedule wasn't perfect yet.
The 2026 version of that schedule played out as written. The AVP's amateur bracket ran July 5 through July 11, with the pro series slotted inside it from July 7 through July 9, per the city's own event calendar. Add the AAU nationals on either side, and you get the same 27-day footprint the council had already flagged as too much.
A second tournament with the same name, built to be different
Here's the part that doesn't show up if you only follow the AVP's official calendar. A separate event, independently organized and presented by Wedbush Securities, also carries the name Hermosa Beach Open, and it returns this year on September 10 through 13.
This isn't a rebranded version of the July stop. It's a different organization entirely, built around a different premise. The event's own materials frame it as a return to the sport's roots in Hermosa, name-checking beach volleyball pioneer Sinjin Smith as a symbol of what the tournament is trying to recover. Admission is free. The event benefits Dig 4 Kids, a nonprofit founded by Olympian Eric Fonoimoana. Organizers said they needed to raise $300,000 for the 2026 edition to cover prize money, a live global stream, and operations, funded by sponsors and donors rather than ticketed gates.
Set the two events side by side and the contrast is the whole story:
| July block (2026) | September weekend (2026) | |
|---|---|---|
| Run by | AVP Tour, paired with AAU nationals | Independently organized, presented by Wedbush Securities |
| Dates | Amateur July 5-11, Pro July 7-9 | September 10-13 |
| Footprint | Part of a 27-day consecutive stretch | Four days, standalone |
| Framing | Current pro tour stop and national junior championship | Tribute to 1960s-70s Hermosa volleyball culture, tied to Sinjin Smith |
| Community tie | Not part of the public record reviewed here | Benefits Dig 4 Kids, founded by Eric Fonoimoana |
The mechanism worth understanding is this: the city's own elected officials went on record saying the July calendar had gotten away from them, and rather than the AVP simply trimming its own footprint, a second organization built a smaller event around the sport's origin story and pointedly kept it outside the crowded month. Hermosa now has two different versions of "Hermosa Beach Open" running on the same sand, four months apart, with almost opposite philosophies about how much of the beach a tournament should be allowed to take.
What four days feels like after twenty-seven
If you're on the Strand or within walking distance this month, here's what that history actually means for your week.
The July stretch this year already happened. If you were here for it, you felt the difference between a single pro weekend and a full month of build-out, competition, and teardown stacked with junior and amateur brackets on either side. That's the 27-day version the council argued about.
September 10 through 13 is a different animal by design. It's four days, not nearly a month. It's free to walk up and watch rather than a ticketed pro session. And because it's explicitly built around the sport's Hermosa origin story rather than a national tour stop, the atmosphere organizers are aiming for is closer to a neighborhood tournament with legends in the lineup than a commercial production filling the beach for weeks at a stretch.
Practically, that means less disruption to the parts of daily life that get hardest to plan around in July. Court setup and breakdown compress into a shorter window. If you walk dogs on the sand or run the Strand path in the early morning, plan around the Pier area specifically during those four days rather than the whole month, since that's historically where this event has staged its courts. And because admission is free, it's genuinely one of the easier volleyball weekends to actually attend rather than watch from a distance.
What this says about the neighborhood
The interesting thing isn't that Hermosa has volleyball tournaments. Every South Bay beach city does. It's that the fight over how much of the public beach a tournament calendar should consume happened here, on the record, with council members using words like "unfair" and describing residents having to walk around courts to reach the water. That fight produced a second event built explicitly as the antidote to the first.
Living in the Sand Section means the beach in front of your house occasionally becomes a stadium. This year, you get to see both versions in the same season: the 27-day version the city argued about, and the four-day version built in response to that argument. Knowing the difference is the kind of local detail that doesn't show up on a calendar app. It comes from paying attention to what your own city council actually said about your own beach.
If you're weighing what it's like to own on the Strand day to day, not just in the brochure months, this is the texture that matters. Jen Caskey Group spends its time in these neighborhoods for exactly this reason, and we're always glad to talk through what a specific block or season actually looks like before you make any decision about it.
