Postponing Sun of a Beach the wrong move

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/01/2015 (4092 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As reported earlier this month, for the first time in nearly three decades Assiniboine Community College won’t host a beach volleyball tournament during the school’s calendar year.

The Sun of a Beach tournament has grown to legendary status during its run at the Keystone Centre. Each year, in March at the end of a long prairie winter, truckloads of sand were hauled into the Manitoba Room where participants came together to play indoor beach volleyball.

To say the event, which is run by the ACC Students’ Association, is an unmitigated success would be an understatement.

Sun of Beach grew to the point where it became a weekend circled on the calendar by students, alumni, community members and volleyball players — who came from as far away as Ontario, Saskatchewan and North and South Dakota to play.

It’s also why the students’ association shouldn’t have postponed the event and rescheduled it to November.

ACCSA president Larry Makarikhin said a survey conducted last year revealed that only six per cent of participants were actual ACC students.

The number of teams also fell from the standard 96 to 76.

For those reasons and the fact the tournament fell during the school’s spring break, Makarikhin said the decision was made to move the event.

We give Makarikhin credit for standing up and taking the bullets for what was sure to be a disappointing story for many in Brandon.

But there’s also more than one way to skin a cat.

While the ACCSA president claims not enough of the participants are college students, he could have easily trumpeted the fact that the event does such a great job at community outreach that many of the teams consist of players who aren’t students at the college.

Student unions at colleges and universities throughout the country spend hours sitting around tables coming up with new and inventive ways to get more community support for events. The ACCSA already had that support.

Makarikhin also claimed that registration falling to 76 teams was proof the event was suffering.

But how many teams does it take to host a tournament?

If it’s more than 76, we would argue there wouldn’t be many volleyball tournaments of any kind, anywhere.

The tournament also served as a great marketing tool for the college.

Still relatively in its infancy, ACC’s athletic program recruited future student-athletes at the same time as Sun of a Beach. It makes a lot of sense to bring prospective students to the school at that time — show them the campus, and, oh yeah, look at how much fun you can have if you come play for the Cougars.

Education is the obvious priority, but having a healthy social life while attending school is still very much part of the equation for student-athletes with options.

This year, the tournament wasn’t marketed at all, meaning the decision to postpone it wasn’t made as recently as last week.

If the students’ association has known for a while that the tournament was going to be rescheduled, it would have been prudent to let the public know.

Since the story ran, several people have told the Brandon Sun that the ACCSA simply didn’t get organized in time to run the tournament in March.

While the elected members of the association deserve some of the criticism they are getting, management should also shoulder its fair share.

Councils come and go, making the association’s management group the backbone of the event.

This school year, that group won’t host Sun of a Beach — and that’s a shame.