By Kassidy Robinson and Evan Xiong
Wingate Triangle contributing writers
The Wingate Athletic Department has announced plans to begin construction of four sand volleyball courts in January for the inaugural women’s beach volleyball team that will begin its first season of play in the spring.
The courts will be located next to the Wingate Softball Complex at 224 E Wilson St., near the intramural soccer fields. According to NCAA regulations, each court will be 16 meters long by 8 meters wide and have an 18-inch sand depth. The NCAA also requires 6 meters of free space between each court and the perimeter if built side by side, so the courts will cover almost 19,000 square feet.
Athletic Director Joe Reich said the cost of the courts is not yet finalized but that “typically, sand courts run about $250,000 for four courts. The variable is the grading on the site around the courts, and landscaping and concrete walkways. That is where the costs can vary.”
Wingate began a new fall fundraising promotion this month called the Wingate Athletics Champions Campaign that will help provide the money. According to the beach volleyball team’s donation tracker , 23 donors have helped them surpass their goal of $5,000. With four days left before the campaign was set to end on Nov. 22, the the team had raised slightly more than $8,000.
“The plan is for the courts to be built using fundraising money,” Reich said. “We would like to have the courts done as soon as possible. It looks like that is probably sometime in January.”
The beach volleyball program is the fourth intercollegiate program added at Wingate in the past four years, following women’s triathlon (2021), field hockey (2022) and acrobatics/tumbling last spring. Former Bulldogs volleyball player Hannah Givens, who graduated from the university in 2019, was hired to be the team’s first head coach in January.
Givens was an All-Region outside hitter for the Bulldogs in 2018. She won two SAC championships and an NCAA Southeast Region title during her time as a player at Wingate. Before officially beginning her new job Feb. 1, Givens oversaw the indoor and beach volleyball programs at the University of Lynchburg, where she also created a team from scratch. The Hornets, who debuted in 2020, were the first NCAA beach volleyball team in the state of Virginia.
Fifteen players will make up Wingate’s debut roster for the 2025 season, but the school is looking for future teams to have an optimal number of 18 to 22 student-athletes to achieve positive revenue within the program. Currently, the average size of a Division 2 roster is 18.3 players, with five full scholarships available.
“The team itself doesn’t cost much relative to the other teams,” said Reich. The beach volleyball program will be Wingate’s 26th intercollegiate sport and it is the fourth South Atlantic Conference school to add the sport, along with Carson-Newman, Catawba and Tusculum. The sport is currently offered by 96 NCAA schools, including 22 Division 2 programs.
The addition of the Bulldogs’ program now gives the state of North Carolina eight schools that play beach volleyball, half of which are junior colleges. The presence of those nearby two-year schools—Sandhills Community College, Gaston College, Catawba Valley Community College and Wake Tech Community College—has provided Wingate with a pipeline of players to help put together a team early on. Five players on the current roster hail from one of those schools.
In addition to Wingate and Catawba, St. Andrews and UNC Wilmington are the other schools fielding beach volleyball teams in the Tar Heel State. The Bulldogs open their inaugural season Feb. 21 at Coastal Carolina and won’t have a home game until mid-March.
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