HERMOSA BEACH, Calif. — No less than 10 times per camp — or clinic, or class, whatever you’d like to call it — Mark Burik and Brandon Joyner will turn to one another and stumble upon the same discovery they stumble upon on an almost-weekly basis: “People love volleyball.”
That word — love — can be in italics and bold and a font that would be far too big to be appropriate for this page. Love might not even be the correct choice, for it just doesn’t do it justice. Is there a single word in the English language that can properly package the passion, the enthusiasm, the obsessiveness, that comes with training for six, sometimes seven hours a day — and then booking a private lesson with either Burik or Joyner or one of their coaches at Better at Beach at 7 the next morning?
“So they’re waking up at 6:15, and we’re coming out, brutalized with a cup of coffee, and we’ll just hear the sounds of peppering, and we’re like ‘What? What are they doing?’” Burik said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter.
What they are doing is exactly what Burik bet on a large portion of the population intending on doing when he initially founded VolleyCamp Hermosa and then rebranded it to Better at Beach: They’re attempting to, ahem, get better at beach volleyball.
They know they’re not going to become professionals. They know you will not see them competing on an AVP Sunday, or streamed on Volleyball TV somewhere in Europe. The clientele for Better at Beach is very much what you might find at, say, a local country club: normal, middle-aged folks seeking a challenge, a community, a way to stay fit and active and pushed in a manner that lights up their brains with endorphins from exercise and the sweet satisfaction of learning new skills.
“Adults already love volleyball when they come, which is cool. But then they get addicted to the feeling of improvement, and that doesn’t happen a lot after college, if you were lucky enough to play in college,” Joyner said. “It’s cool as an adult, especially with volleyball, because it’s very technical, so you teach them something and they get better at it, and they think ‘Oh cool, I’m 48 years old and I’ve gotten better at something.’ Now they think they can get better at setting, they can get better at hitting, and it makes them think outside of volleyball, which is cool, because it helps them realize they can pick up anything so long as they have passion and put time in.
“You realize that you are building a community, you’re bringing people together that probably wouldn’t be together and now they’re best friends. That goes into seeing improvement and betterment of life and it’s fun.”
For years, VolleyCamp Hermosa was a virtual one-man band. It was Burik’s company, growing exclusively as he envisioned it growing. And it was successful. Checked every box a young entrepreneur would want checked. Yet something was missing.
“If I build an empire — imagine someone sitting at the top of the hill, all proud, but alone, just, oh, that’s not cool. I want to sit when I’m 50 with a glass of whiskey and a big pile of money with my buddy, and we can celebrate,” said Burik, who is 14 years away from his envisioned retirement of whiskey and piles of money at 50. “It would be silly to build it on your own.”
In came Joyner, one of his closest friends, a former teammate at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. They met during Joyner’s freshman season, and so pudgy was Joyner that when enrolled, Burik dubbed him “bubbles,” Joyner said, laughing, “because my body didn’t have any shape.”
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Such is the barbed, testosterone-fueled love language of male college athletes. Almost as immediately as Burik tabbed the young setter with the nickname did he take him under his wing, showing him how to lift, shaping that previously amorphous bubble-body.
