From a broader standpoint, Kelly Unverdorben has been involved in beach volleyball for nearly a decade.

She heads up the locally-based, and distinguished, Octane/OC travel team, which has qualified for nationals the last nine years and last summer sent 14 squads to Fort Lauderdale, where “we did pretty well.” Within this summer program, she’s taken her teams to any number of regional tournaments. She even has a couple of sand courts in her own backyard.

Now, however, the accomplished Portville indoor girls coach is helping to usher in a more local element for the sport.

And one can certainly understand why this is the right time.

Girls beach volleyball is one of the fastest-growing scholastic sports in the country, with participant numbers nearly tripling from 2018-19 to 2021-22, according to an October article on sportsdestinations.com. This is due, in large part, to the increased prevalence at the collegiate level, where the number of female beach players has spiked from 868 in 2016 to 1,485 in 2022, per the NCAA.

NOW WITH an existing local niche, that number will only continue to grow.

Unverdorben and other local high school coaches have come together to create the “Battle at the Border,” a six-town program (for now) that will play a five-match schedule held each Wednesday in May. Its name comes from the fact that there are three towns from either side of the state border participating: Olean, Bolivar and Portville in New York and Bradford, Oswayo Valley and Otto-Eldred in Pennsylvania.

Matches, known as duels, will be held at three locations, each of which feature the three necessary courts for competition: Riverside Sand Courts in Portville, Good Times of Olean and Believer’s Chapel in Olean.

TO UNVERDORBEN, there’s a baseline positive to offering this kind of opportunity to local volleyball players. “It’s a great way to work on their skills and have a ball in their hands (in the offseason) rather than sitting at home,” she noted. More specifically, there are three primary advantages to beach play, all of which have been major factors to its burgeoning movement nationally:

More versatility, more agency and less injury risk.

And that’s what she’s hoping to spotlight with “Battle at the Border.”

“It’s the touches,” said Unverdorben, who’s won seven state indoor high school titles — six at Portville, including the 2022 crown, and one at Cattaraugus-Little Valley. “There’s only two kids on the court; there’s no subbing, nobody on the bench.”

Of the versatility component, she added: “They play every aspect of the game. They have to serve, serve-receive, they have to be a setter, a hitter, a blocker, a defender, and it really is rounding out their game and they become better indoor players because of it. I think the kids love that part too because in indoor, maybe they only play the front row, maybe they don’t ever get to serve or set. Whatever it may be, they get to do all of it.”

THE LOCAL league will have roughly the same structure as a scholastic tennis match. Each team will field five two-player squads, with the No. 1s playing each other, the No. 2s playing the 2s and so on. The duel will be a best-of-five format with matches taking place simultaneously.

But the pluses to this kind of circuit go beyond the on-sand aspects.

In beach volleyball, which Unverdorben described as extremely different from indoor, to the point where “if you didn’t know any better you wouldn’t think the two sports were related,” coaches can’t coach during game play and parents can’t react from the sideline, leaving players to figure and work things out on their own.

Additionally, this might give local players more of an opportunity at the growing number of collegiate scholarships available, which have mostly only been open to kids from warmer climates. In fact, there has already been one such local instance, as Oswayo Valley star Avaree Kellert, an OC/Octane alum, has signed to play Division I beach volleyball at Liberty.

And though this league will fall in the heart of the scholastic spring season, the aim isn’t to discourage kids from playing those sports, Unverdorben said, but rather to enhance (and work around) those campaigns and to provide another spring option.

“IT’S GREAT for them to keep doing what they love to do as well as this, so (we’re) making this more of an addition,” she said. “It’s also great for the kids that don’t participate in a spring sport. I know a lot of us have soccer players … they don’t do softball or track and they would love to do volleyball, but they’re (primarily soccer players in the fall). Here’s a way that they can do some volleyball. We’ve got some kids that run track and I think it’s just a great little addition for them to stay in shape as well.

“We’re all continuing to support our softball and track programs. It’s trying something new without giving up something old that they love.”

The goal now is to contribute to this beach volleyball explosion. Not only is there the hope that the league itself will grow, but that perhaps someday this can become a sanctioned scholastic sport in New York state.

“It’s the first year, so we’ll see how this rolls,” Unverdorben said with a laugh. “It should be fun, I’m excited. Hopefully we can get more schools involved as the years ago and get some little leagues or something. I think we’ll end up with the Cuba-Rushfords and the Allegany-Limestones. There’s such a strong base that plays over the summer around here anyway.”