The team was created because of the pandemic; they did not know until the last minute whether they had approval to play, and then the coach spent half the inaugural season trying to get enough games scheduled so they could compete in the district championship.
Despite those obstacles, the Tohopekaliga beach volleyball team endured and now the Tigers compete in the very first FHSAA State Championship Tournament this weekend.
“To say it’s been a wild ride is an incredible understatement,” Coach Eric Capestany said. “Our beach volleyball started out of the need to keep training our athletes during the start of the Covid pandemic in 2020. When everything shut down we wanted to find a creative way we continue to train. We bought some outside nets and ball and found some sand.”
Tohopekaliga had about 12 girls show up for those early sessions but by this year, 40 girls were playing and Capestany realized the outdoor beach game could evolve into something big. This coincided with discussions around the state on whether it should be recognized as a varsity sport. When it was announced last fall that it would be indeed added, the real scramble just began for the Tohopekaliga program.
“The first thing that happened is we had to get permission from our administration to have a team compete on the varsity level. That approval came late and when the season began we actually only had a few games scheduled. Since we had to have seven regular season matches in order to qualify for districts we were still adding games in the regular season,” Capestany explained.
What made things even more difficult was the fact that the girls’ beach volleyball season ran concurrently with the boys’ indoor season, which was coached by Capestany and his assistant Joel Gray. They both retained their duties with the boys indoor team, with Gray assuming the beach team head coaching job with Capestany assisting — and coaching two different teams at the same time was a challenge.
“We scrambled to make sure we had as few game conflicts as possible, and arranging practice times was also difficult.” When reached for this story, Capastany chuckled, “You apologized for calling after 9 p.m.,” he said. “That was funny because I had not even gotten home from practice yet and was still in my car. That’s been a pretty typical day for our coaches and me.”
Beach volleyball consists of five two-person teams (lines) that play best-of-3 sets. All five lines play at the same time and each line that wins gets a point for the team, with three points needed to win the match.
During the regular season the Tigers qualified for districts by going 5-4 in nine matches, with three losses coming by 3-2 margins. Although the beach players were members of Capestany’s OBC champion indoor team, they not always able to field their best team outdoors.
“A lot of our best players also play club volleyball, which is really a big deal in this state and they sometimes had to miss our beach games due to club commitments,” Capestany said. “In three of those close losses we had we were missing two or three of our best players because they were playing club tournaments.”
In the postseason the Tigers made plenty of noise, defeating Lake Nona (3-2) and Cypress Creek (4-1) in the district tournament to earn a spot in the state championship – a 31-team single elimination bracket tournament that will be contested at Florida State University starting
“It would be great to get more county teams involved. Would love to see the beach game grow and create some in-county rivalries.”
