Building a Beach Volleyball Court (Part I)

I have been asked to blog about building my beach court in the backyard and therefore I figure I will do so in a couple of blogs. I will tell the story and eventually get in to some of the costs of things. It is actually still ongoing but more because the beach court has morphed into doing a bunch of landscaping throughout the backyard.

The Beach Court has been in the back of mine as well as my wife's minds since we moved to the Santa Ynez Valley about 5 years ago. We bought an acre and there is room to put things in like beach courts, pools, corrals, ect... We conceptualized for about 3 years before actually acting on our addiction to the beach game. Part of that was of course money. Didn't have enough to put in a decent court without going into debt and I really did not want to do that. Part of that was how do we go about doing it. So after a good 2005 beach season with Sean Scott and a promising new partnership with Phil Dalhausser, we finally made the decision to go for it.

I looked online for "how to build a beach court" and didn't find a lot of help. I spoke with several folks in my area who do have beach courts and they did give me lots of helpful advice. How deep to go, what kind of poles and nets to use, what kind of sand to get and helpful things like that.

I spoke with a friend of mine, Mark, who is a heavy equipment operator for the fire department. He had never put in a beach volleyball court but had put in a pool for his brother and has been a heavy equipment operator for about 20 years or more. The guy basically knows what he is doing. I did some measurements in the back yard and after measuring several spots, I finally found the place it would go. My friend told me all the phone calls I had to make and took care of all the heavy equipment stuff for me.

We found a four day weekend where he could come over and I would be around and made sure all the equipment that we needed was here on the start date. That was in February of 2006 to give you a bit of a time frame here.

The previous 3 weeks saw me cutting down trees and bushes and removing our vegetable garden boxes to another area. Get your hands dirty kind of work which I actually enjoy doing in my own yard. It also saw Mark and I, more Mark really, work out how the court would be shaped and how the area would look once we were done. My wife and I didn't want the court to be totally above ground with railroad ties to hold the sand in. We wanted it slightly sunk in so when you looked into the backyard from the house, you would see the top half of the net and poles. Kind of a hint of a beach court but not the whole thing staring you in the face.

Mark and I hammered out an area that was ready for the "beach" to be put in over that 4 day period. The first day he cleared the area of grass, tree stumps, bushes, roots, and anything else that was in the way. We put it all in a Marborg dumpster I had ordered. I was his gopher for the little things. I moved a fence back about 30 feet which enlarged an area for more grass since we were taking away a large area of grass. On the second day we started to dig a little and start to shape up where the actual sand would go. Also started to build some dirt mounds that would become landscaping mounds around the court to kind of "hide it" from view. The third day saw us continue the second days work but we started to run into a problem of extra dirt. As Mark says, "dirt grows". Boy does it ever. We were fortunate in that a neighbor literally behind my house needed dirt to fill in an old pool area. She came over and asked if we had any extra dirt, she would take it all. We had a dump truck delivered on the 4th day and begun to load it up and unload it on her property. Worked out pretty well as dirt is not cheap to get rid of nor to buy so both my neighbor and I were able to save a little money. By the end of the 4th day we had a nice area to put in the beach court.

At that point in time I was thinking I would have a beach court by the end of March. Little did I know all the hoops I would have to jump through to get to that point.