Walk down to Main Beach the week before the Laguna Open and you will watch the sand get organized. Where kids build castles most of the year, crews mark out the Hotel Laguna South Court, the Championship Center Court, the Tower Court, the Tide Courts, and the Historic Cuervo North Court, the same names locals have used for generations, wedged between the Hotel Laguna, the Boardwalk, and the Inn at Laguna. This year the tournament runs September 18 through 20, its 71st edition, and if you have lived here more than a summer you already know it happens. What most residents miss is what actually gets settled on that sand, because the Laguna Open is not one tournament. It is a professional beach volleyball event and a neighborhood grudge match sharing the same three days, and the second one is the reason locals show up who could not name a single AVP pro.
A tournament older than the sport's own governing body
The Laguna Open started in 1955, which means it predates the AVP by nearly three decades. Gene Selznick and Bernie Holtzman won that first tournament over Don McMahon and Mike O'Hara, and Selznick came back to take the next two years as well, a three-peat that set the tone for a beach that has never stopped taking its volleyball seriously. Selznick went on to coach in the Olympics and, according to local lore, played frequently with Wilt Chamberlain, which tells you something about the caliber of company this stretch of sand has kept. The names that followed read like a history of the sport itself: Ron Lang, Ron Von Hagen, Greg Lee, Jim Menges, Sinjin Smith, Randy Stoklos, Karch Kiraly. Dain Blanton and Erica Fonoimoana, who went on to win Olympic gold at the 2000 Sydney Games, are part of that same lineage. None of this is retired history. The 2026 event carries AVP Heritage Major status, which puts it inside the tour's marquee tier rather than treating it as a nostalgic throwback.
What that pedigree obscures is how close the whole thing came to disappearing.
The year the tournament nearly lost its courts
A 1991 city ordinance made it difficult to raise the funds the tournament needed, and for a stretch of years the Laguna Open languished. It did not come back because a sponsor rescued it. It came back because Kirk Morgan, who directed the event for over a decade, and a community of volunteers decided the beach was not going to lose its tournament on a technicality. That is the version of the story residents tend to forget once an event feels permanent. It was not permanent. It was saved.
The prize money tells the same story in numbers. In 1996, Brian Wisely and fellow local Mike Garcia won the Open for a $150 purse, which they spent taking the other competitors out to dinner. Today the tournament's own materials list total prize money at $150,000, a thousandfold jump that mirrors the sport's transformation from a beach pastime into a televised professional tour. The distance between those two figures is the distance between a trophy that bought dinner and a tour stop that draws Olympians, and Laguna Beach's stretch of sand sat at both ends of it.
Four beaches, one bracket, no entry fee
Here is the part that turns a spectator sport into a local one. On Sunday, right before the men's and women's finals, four teams take the same courts to play for nothing but a medal and the right to talk about it for a year. They represent Main Beach, Victoria Beach, Three Arch Bay, and Emerald Bay, and the event is called Battle of the Beaches for a reason locals understand intuitively: these are not interchangeable patches of sand. Each of those four beaches has its own volleyball culture, its own regulars, its own sense of who belongs on its side of the net. Main Beach is the public heart of downtown, right where the tournament lives all weekend. Victoria Beach, Three Arch Bay, and Emerald Bay each carry their own separate identity as residential coves along the coast, and for one afternoon a year that separateness becomes a literal bracket instead of an assumption.
There is no purse attached to Battle of the Beaches. That is the point. The professional draw exists for the AVP tour and its $150,000 in stakes. The neighborhood draw exists because Laguna Beach has never treated its beaches as one undifferentiated shoreline, and this is the one weekend the city lets that show up as competition rather than just conversation at the farmers market.
The weekend, hour by hour
For anyone planning around it, the schedule breaks down like this:
- Friday, September 18 — Qualifier Round, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
- Saturday, September 19 — Main Draw, 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.
- Sunday, September 20 — Men's and Women's Quarterfinals, 8 to 10 a.m.; Semifinals, 10 a.m. to noon; Finals, noon to 2 p.m.; Battle of the Beaches at 2 p.m.
The qualifier is where hopeful teams punch their way into the main draw, so Friday tends to draw a thinner, more locally rooted crowd than the weekend does. By Sunday afternoon the beach is at its fullest, and the Battle of the Beaches finals land at the exact moment when the pro finals crowd is still in its seats, which is no accident of scheduling.
What actually being there involves
The Laguna Open has never built grandstands, and it is not going to start now. Seating is on the sand, so bring a chair or a blanket, and know that in certain sections umbrellas are not allowed so everyone can see the court. Entry is free. Steve Obradovich, who competed on the AVP circuit through the 1970s and 80s and won the Open himself in 1977, put it simply when he described coming back to watch: "It's surreal down here." That reaction has less to do with the level of play and more to do with the setup itself, a narrow strip of Main Beach with no barrier between the crowd and the court, cars still passing on Coast Highway just behind you.
Parking follows the same logic as every other busy weekend downtown. Street parking along Forest Avenue and Ocean Avenue is the most direct option, and the city's parking and transportation information covers the structures and metered lots if street spots fill early, which they will by Saturday afternoon. The free trolley runs throughout the weekend, which means you can park farther out and skip the search entirely. If you would rather confirm dates, bracket details, or volunteer opportunities directly, the tournament's own site and the city's recreation page both stay current through the weekend.
Why this is worth knowing before you live here longer
Most towns have a signature event that visitors know about and locals half ignore because it has always been there. The Laguna Open earns a second look precisely because the part that matters most to residents, the Battle of the Beaches, is not the part that shows up in AVP marketing. It is the part that only makes sense once you understand that Main Beach, Victoria Beach, Three Arch Bay, and Emerald Bay have never really been one beach with four names. They are four communities that happen to share a coastline, and for one Sunday afternoon in September, that difference gets to play out on sand instead of just in conversation.
If you already know which beach you would put your money on, you already understand Laguna Beach better than most people who have only visited. If you are still figuring out where you fit along this coast, from the enclaves tucked into their own coves to the open stretch of Main Beach, that is exactly the kind of local texture our team spends every season tracking. Tyler Brown & Associates works this coastline year-round, and if you would like a conversation grounded in that same local detail, you can book a private consultation whenever the timing is right for you.
