2026 AVP Season Announced!

Dear Readers~

    Back in November the AVP (Association of Volleyball Professionals) announced that they made their choices on the 2026 season. They usually release their schedules in January or February, so having it be released before Thanksgiving and Christmas was a surprise to quite a few, including myself. If you're familiar with me, I'm a big fan of the AVP and attend the tournament they have in Manhattan Beach, California every August. I've gone to it every year since 2021 while 2019 was the first time I went. This specific tournament is called the Manhattan Beach Open, or MBO for short. I've made several friends over the years (most went to USC) and have met more Olympians than I can count. Some of these friends include players like Travis Mewhirter, Molly Turner, Maddie Anderson, and Melissa Powell.

    This year the season is split into three kinds of tournaments. They include league events, heritage majors, and heritage contenders. The previously mentioned MBO is one of three heritage majors, along with Huntington Beach (in Orange County, California), and Belmar, New Jersey (south of the New York City area). This year, along with the 3 previously mentioned heritage majors, there are also 9 league events and 8 heritage contenders. This gives a total of 20 events the AVP will host this 2026 season. In 2025 the season was made up of 9 league events, 2 heritage events, and 4 contender events. This means 2025 had 15 tournaments compared to the 20 that will be happening in 2026. This gives you 5 more chances to watch, or even play, in an AVP for the summer of 2026.

    Let's see which cities got added along with which changed their stops and which ones stayed the same. Manhattan and Huntington Beach both stayed as Heritage Majors (this name just changed from Heritage Event) and was joined by the new stop of Belmar, New Jersey. The stops for the league events include Miami (Florida), Central Park and East Hampton (New York), Dallas (Texas), and the championships in Chicago (Illinois). The cities joining the league events that weren't there last year include Aspen (Colorado), Las Vegas (Nevada), and Atlantic City (New Jersey). The cities that are not league stops this year but were last year include Palm Beach (Florida), San Diego (California), and Ausitn (Texas). The heritage contenders that remain the same include Waupaca (Wisconsin), Virginia Beach (Virginia), and Denver (Colorado) while taking out Palm Beach (Florida). The stops they added include Austin (Texas), Pompano (Florida), Laguna Beach (California), Aspen (Colorado), and Edwardsville (Illinois).

The 2026 schedule

    So, with 2024 being the first year of the AVP trying this whole "League" thing out, it was much easier to figure out how it worked by the time the 2025 season concluded. Let's find out the difference between that and the tournaments that make up the heritage majors and contenders. For the 2025 season, the league stops had 8 teams for each gender but each city only had 4 teams per gender playing and each team only played one game on day one and one game on day two (since the tournament in Manhattan Beach was the only tournament all season to be made up of three days while all others were only made up of two days of play. The way the league works (based on the 2025 season) is that each pair that played got one point. if you played and won, you got an additional point, so you could end the weekend with either 2, 3, or 4 points, depending on how you played. If you and the person you played with were in the top 6 of your gender points wise come the end of the 8 league stops, you would play in the league championships in Chicago on Oak Street Beach Labor Day weekend (this has been the conclusion of the AVP season for many years). A big difference in the league from the other two is that the league is in a stadium and requires a ticket (like basketball or hockey for example) as to where the others have free general admission and tend to be outside. Last year the stop in San Diego took place at San Diego State's Viejas Arena, the one in Miami took place at the Wayfair Arena, and one of the ones in Los Angeles took place at the Intuit Dome (where the Clippers of the NBA play).

    That concludes the first blog of the 2026 AVP season. I covered the heritage majors, and the league stops last season but have contemplated only doing the heritage majors this year so let me know what you think. Would you like to hear about the league stops as well? For the first blog of 2025 I talked about how I wanted to do better on my writings, so I hope you think they progressed compared to my announcement of the 2025 AVP season earlier last year. I hope you look forward to either NCAA Beach Volleyball or Men's Indoor Volleyball (still debating on this one) as those will be starting this spring. followed by the AVP season. Like I mentioned earlier, I attend the AVP tournament that happens in Manhattan Beach and I will be attending the NCAA Beach Volleyball championships in Gulf Shores, Alabama the first weekend of May so stay tuned for those special blogs later in the year. I hope you've enjoyed seeing my blogs progress throughout 2025 and I hope to continue to make them better in 2026 and until next time, Miller out

~J. Miller

Announcement: Not long after completing this topic, there was an announcement by the AVP stating that the stop of Belmar, New Jersey will be the first stop of the season happening May 30th and 31st. The Belmar stop at the end of May will be replaced by the Laguna stop taking place September 18th-20th and making it a heritage event instead of a heritage contender. The final stop of the season will take place on October 2nd and 3rd in Santa Barbara, California. The Pompano Open heritage contender on May 23rd and 24th was renamed to the South Florida Open but kept the same date.

Here is the new schedule if any of these new stops interest you more