"It was not a sport. It was a fantastic lifestyle." Peter Ott has lived in Laguna Beach since the canyon was cattle ranches and wilderness, and when the Laguna Beach Indy asked him about the tournament that's run on that same sand since 1955, that's the line he gave them. Seventy-one years later, the pros still show up on that same sand. So does everyone else, for a part of the weekend the pros don't even play in.
That part is called Battle of the Beaches, and it happens every year on the tournament's final Sunday. Four teams. Four beaches. No AVP card required, just a roster from Main Beach, Victoria Beach, Three Arch Bay, or Emerald Bay. Most write-ups treat it as a nice local footnote to the real tournament happening around it. Read four years of results back to back, though, and a different story shows up: one beach has quietly built the closest thing this event has to a dynasty, and another has shown up every single year without ever winning it.
Four Beaches, One Sandbar
Laguna Beach gets described from the outside as a single stretch of coast. Anyone who has actually stood on it knows better. Main Beach is the wide, flat downtown anchor where the Laguna Open has always been played. Victoria Beach, Three Arch Bay, and Emerald Bay are smaller, more private coves further down the coastline, each with its own access, its own regulars, and evidently its own volleyball pride.
Battle of the Beaches is the one weekend a year that private is put aside long enough for these four communities to line up against each other in public, on Main Beach's sand, in front of whoever's brought a beach chair. The tournament's own materials describe the fan experience as "toes in the sand," no grandstands, spectators close enough to hear the trash talk. For one Sunday afternoon, the coves come to town.
The Scoreboard Nobody's Been Keeping
Here's what the documented record actually shows, pulled from tournament recaps across the years results were reported:
| Year | Champion | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | Main Beach | Won as the "Main Beach Misfits" |
| 2021 | Victoria Beach | Won the title, defended it into 2022 |
| 2022 | Emerald Bay | First title in the rivalry's history, beat Main Beach in the final; Victoria Beach 3rd, Three Arch Bay 4th |
| 2024 | Emerald Bay | Repeat champion, beat Main Beach in the final again |
Not every year's result made it into public reporting, so this isn't a perfect unbroken ledger. But the pattern across the years that were documented is not subtle. Emerald Bay won its first title ever in 2022, then beat the same opponent, Main Beach, in the final again in 2024. That's back-to-back championships against the same finalist, which is as close to a dynasty as a four-team, once-a-year rivalry gets. Meanwhile Three Arch Bay has fielded a team every year the event has run and has never been better than fourth. It is the tournament's most consistent participant and its most consistent runner-up to everyone.
If Emerald Bay wins again this September, it will be the first threepeat in the documented record of this rivalry, which happens to echo the very first years of the Laguna Open itself. Gene Selznick, who won the inaugural 1955 tournament with Bernie Holtzman over Don McMahon and Mike O'Hara, then won again in 1956 and 1957 for a threepeat of his own. Selznick is also remembered locally for playing frequently with Wilt Chamberlain. Whatever happens on the sand this weekend, Emerald Bay would be chasing a piece of the same history Laguna's first champion set.
Grassroots Money in a Pro Tour Event
The Laguna Open now runs as an AVP-sanctioned event, which sounds like it should mean corporate purses and title sponsors. It mostly doesn't. In 1996, Brian Wisely, who still owns The Well Fitness Studio in town, and his partner Mike Garcia won the tournament for a purse of $150, which they spent taking their competitors out to dinner. By 2021 that purse had grown to $18,500. In 2022 it hit $24,000, a 30 percent jump in a single year. By the time the Laguna Beach Indy covered the 2024 event, organizers put the figure at $30,000 and still growing. The tournament's own materials today describe it as an "AVP Heritage Event" with $150,000 in total prize money on offer across the full weekend's divisions.
That growth, from a dinner tab to six figures across three decades, has happened without the tournament ever stopping being what it started as. It is still, by the organizers' own description, a hundred percent volunteer-run event where entry fees go straight back into the purse. No title sponsor's name is on the tournament itself. The sponsors listed in recent years, from local mortgage brokers to Hobie Sports to Dick's Sporting Goods, read like a list of who wanted to be associated with it, not who's running it.
Names on the Sand
Part of why the Laguna Open still pulls Olympic-level talent to a volunteer-run weekend is who's already walked away from it. At the 2022 tournament, Dain Blanton, an Olympic gold medalist and Laguna hometown favorite, worked the announcer's booth alongside Sinjin Smith, an Olympic silver medalist, Randy Stoklos, and Dane Selznick, Gene's son. Smith and Stoklos are, by most accounts, the most successful winning pair in the history of professional beach volleyball, and they still turn up to talk about a hometown tournament that never paid what the sport's biggest purses do.
The local talent pipeline runs in both directions. At the 2024 event, Laguna Beach High School's Kyra Zaengle, already nationally ranked and committed to USC for women's volleyball, partnered with two-time Olympian Kelly Cheng, a pairing tournament co-director Patrick Canavan called one of the best moments the Open had seen in a decade. Canavan runs the tournament today alongside co-director Marty Suan, both of them, like the athletes, part of a chain that runs back to Selznick's first win in 1955.
How to Actually Watch It
The 71st Annual Laguna Open runs September 18 through 20, 2026, at Main Beach. Friday, September 18 is the qualifier round, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday, September 19 is the main draw, 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday, September 20 is finals day: quarterfinals from 8 to 10 a.m., semifinals 10 a.m. to noon, men's and women's finals noon to 2 p.m., and Battle of the Beaches at 2 p.m. Entry is free the entire weekend.
Play happens across a set of named courts that locals have used for decades: the Hotel Laguna South Court, the Championship Center Court, the Tower Court, the Tide Courts, and the Historic Cuervo North Court. If you want to watch without fighting for parking, the city runs a free trolley through downtown all weekend, and street parking along Forest Avenue and Ocean Avenue tends to be the easiest bet if you're driving in. Bring a beach chair. In some seating areas along the sand, umbrellas aren't allowed, purely so everyone behind you can actually see the net.
If Sunday afternoon is the only part of the weekend you catch, make it the 2 p.m. slot. That's when four beaches that mostly keep to themselves the other 364 days a year settle a score that, going into this September, one of them has won twice running and another hasn't won at all.
Whichever beach you call home, or whichever one you're rooting for from the sand, that's the Laguna most people driving through on Coast Highway never get to see. It's one of the reasons this town rewards the kind of attention that only comes from actually living here, block by block and cove by cove. If you're weighing what a specific stretch of this coastline is really worth, or thinking about where your own piece of it might fit, that's the conversation Marcus Skenderian Real Estate has every day. Reach out anytime for a complimentary home valuation grounded in the same neighborhood-level detail as everything above.
