De Anza College has begun planning for a new beach volleyball facility to replace the current softball field, with construction dates to be finalized. 

Beach volleyball has been one of the fastest emerging National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) sports in the country. The first inaugural season of beach volleyball at De Anza was in early 2022.

“Approximately 45 community colleges now in the state of California (have beach volleyball),” Dawnis Guevara, De Anza’s head volleyball coach said. “We ended up fourth in conference, and we had a couple of our teams that made it to Northern California playoffs.” 

Guevara has been an advocate for the construction of a beach volleyball facility for seven years now. 

“There’s viability studies that have been done and there’s always been an interest,” Guevara said. 

De Anza’s Athletic Director Ron Hannon said that the beach volleyball facility is a Measure G Bond Project and still in its early developmental phase. 

“We’re in the kind of think big, dream big, think out loud kind of stage,” Hannon said. “It’s a
really fun part of the process, because you can think about all these different bells and whistles
and characteristics and components of the facility that you’d like to have.”

Apart from the Mountain Lions having a home turf, the new facility also opens up possibilities for other student athletes. 

“We anticipate our other programs are also going to use it for conditioning and resistance training and those types of things,” Hannon said. “We’re going to get a lot more use out of this than just playing beach volleyball on it, which creates a lot of opportunities.”

Although there will be no more softball field following the beach volleyball facility replacement, De Anza hasn’t been able to fill the roster to keep the sport running the last couple of years. Hannon said he wouldn’t rule out the sport never making a return.

“As of right now, it looks like the college is committed to kind of going in a different direction, creating a different kind of an opportunity for our students,” Hannon said. 

De Anza student Tristen Jozefowicz, 19, economics major, has been playing volleyball competitively since her junior year of high school and plays for the college’s volleyball and beach volleyball teams.

“I’ve never been on a team this committed to winning and this committed to getting better,” Jozefowicz said. “Practice is fun, you’re very embedded in the game all the time.” 

She voiced her own enthusiasm at the announcement of the new beach volleyball courts at De Anza. 

“I’m excited for the new courts coming in because the courts that we were playing at were not the best,” Jozefowicz said. “I love the freshmen on my team, and I’m excited for them to be able to experience it.”

Schematic design of the facility is to be determined, along with a timeline of construction dates, sometime in the near future.  

“I’m beyond excited,” Guevera said. “Our school has invested into not only another female sport [but also] a sport that so many kids are, like, excited about doing.”