John Sutton and Violeta Slabakova didn’t expect they’d need to convince their cab driver in Sofia, Bulgaria, that their destination was a real, actual place, and not some made-up fantasyland.
Beach volleyball courts? In Bulgaria?
“This does not exist,” the cab driver assured Sutton and Slabakova, beach volleyball players from the East Coast of the United States who were in Bulgaria for a wedding.
You can hardly blame the cabbie.
Yariv Lerner nearly made the same mistake three years prior.
Lerner, the CEO of Nu Boyana Film Studios, one of the top film producing studios in Europe, was driving through Sofia, looking for a place to shoot, when he came across a dome near the valley of the telegenic snow-capped Vitosha Mountain.
“I said ‘Oh, that’s an interesting place, I wonder what goes on inside there,’” Lerner said. “I go inside, and there’s these beautiful sand volleyball courts. I said ‘Wow, this is great.’”
Lerner is a man of many passions, though at the top are film and volleyball, and not necessarily in that order. He grew up playing on the beaches of Cape Town, South Africa. When he moved to Southern California, he’d play every morning from 7-9 a.m. with Tom Black and the late Mark Barber, then warm up Randy Stoklos and Sinjin Smith for an hour, all of which proceded playing on the workup courts at Sorrento Beach from noon to sundown. But that morning in Bulgaria, when he drove past the domed Sofia Beach, Lerner was, in his own words, “fat, out of shape, hadn’t played in seven years before that.
“I struggled through. The knees were creaky, I had rusted up like the tin man. But they could see I could somehow move, and I played with Onur [Kara], the owner. They said ‘Come play every Tuesday and Wednesday in the evenings.’ As that happened, Onur was building the hotel.”
They became a team, Lerner and Kara, on and off the court. On the court at Sofia Beach, they’d play pickup every week. Off it, they’d discuss the strategies of how to make Sofia Beach an economically viable business: A volleyball training centre, complete with a weight room, restaurant, hotel - everything you'd need to train and compete full-time in a country that has been devoid of exactly that.
It is a beautiful facility, truly. Tucked just beneath the lush, green, snow-capped mountains, it is a stunning place to play and train. Adam Roberts, who has played hundreds of events in a long and winding career, has never seen anything quite like it.
“It’s amazing,” said Roberts, who will be competing in the qualifier for this week’s one-star event at Sofia Beach.
“It was kind of like a field of dreams: if you build it, they will come,” Lerner said. “I helped divert [Kara's] attention to something that could work: A volley hotel. We could bring in players from all over the world. We just have to grow it, to understand the lifestyle. Bulgaria has a really strong indoor tradition and teams and athletes. They just have to understand what the beach game is, and they’ll get it.”
Lerner and Kara began with an exhibition last summer, bringing in Swiss teams Adrian Heidrich and Mirco Gerson, Marco Krattiger and Florian Breer, as well as Austrians Moritz Pristauz-Telznigg and Martin Ermacora, among others. Now, this week, Lerner is directing the first FIVB event in Bulgaria, a one-star so packed that the reserve list stretches to 46 on the men’s side and 28 on the women, an unprecedented volume for a one-star event.
“We wanted to do a two-star and a three-star, but we also wanted to respect the local players and their levels here and we knew that even if we could get them a wild card they wouldn’t do as well as they needed to grow the sport,” Lerner said. “Ultimately, the goal is to get a team from Bulgaria into the Olympics in about four years, so we’re starting this development programme.”
As the Bulgarian programme rises, so, too, will the level of competition held at Sofia Beach. This year will feature four total FIVBs, all one stars. Next year, the plan is to host a one-, two-, three- and potentially a four-star.
“We created Sofia Beach Club with the goal of getting a team into the 2024 Olympics,” Lerner said. “We think there’s a really good possibility to do so. The new president of the Bulgaria Federation saw an opportunity to increase the popularity of the sport that wasn’t previously there.”
More information:
Men's entry list
Women's entry list
Quick links:
FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour - Sofia
Olympic Games Tokyo 2020
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