Among the merch on offer at the LOVB Championship earlier this month, I noted a faded black hat with silver stitching — “From Cali, With LOVB.”
It’s fitting, with a good chunk of the league’s future growth dependent on the Golden State. Pro teams in Los Angeles and San Francisco launch in 2027, the same year the FIVB World Championships come to Anaheim. The LA28 Olympics await a year after that.
“This is the mecca,” Ana Mendy, the newly named LOVB Los Angeles president, told me at the championship two weeks ago. “It is palpable. You don’t have to create. The fan base is here, the players are here, the talent is here. It’s just been waiting for a pro team to arrive.”
That certainly was clear at the championship, which LOVB held at Long Beach State University. Particularly with a packed house for the Saturday matches, the crowd set an electric atmosphere for Austin’s win over Salt Lake.
The product on the court is so clearly compelling. And it certainly didn’t hurt that it went to a Golden Set — an intense, winner-take-all fifth set — in the final (as it had for both semifinals).
It’s the type of entertainment that aided the league’s expansion to the West Coast and an eagerness to buy in. LOVB Los Angeles is owned by Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six, while LOVB San Francisco is a who’s who of the Bay Area’s sports icons, tech investors and thought leaders. (Genuinely, the ownership list is so long I wonder who has not bought into that team.)
“I am very, very sold on volleyball being massive. I also really love the fact that volleyball is a women’s-first professional sport,” Jes Wolfe told me. The LOVB San Francisco chairwoman and CEO of Rebel Girls was one of dozens of red-jacketed SF owners at the championship, alongside Ali Riley, Abby Wambach, Julie Foudy, Holly Rowe and Ari Chambers.
“I really liked the branding. I really liked the connection,” she said. “After each match, there would be hordes and hordes of girls that would just wait there for their signatures. And you could see this demographic that wasn’t being served by professional sports and that this was going to be a really, really important thing for them.”
That youth-to-pro connection helped bring in both ownership groups — already, 10% of LOVB’s 90 clubs are in California — and it’s part of how they’re hoping to grow. It’s not the same ground-floor buy-in Ohanian had with just $2 million to launch Angel City (now valued at $340 million), but he sees it as the same kind of opportunity.
“The advantage of being new right now, to take advantage of this technology, to do the kinds of community building, fan activation, storytelling, I want to set a bar so high that the most valuable teams in the world are looking around going, ‘Why aren’t we doing that? How are they doing this and we’re not?’” he said. “And this sport absolutely has all the ingredients necessary.”
That’s what the bet is.
Among the other merch (and in massive banners hung around the arena), LOVB touted “volleyball is the next major league.” The new ownership certainly thinks it is, and part of what might get it there is California turbo charging the sport’s growth in the next several years.
“Everyone else who’s yet to jump in, this is going to be worth multiples what it is now post-Olympics,” Mendy said. “It’s going to be the sort of thing that’s going to look so obvious come the L.A. Olympics and what happens after.”
