Over the Top : CABLE NETWORKS GIVE LOW-PROFILE SPORTS A NEW ARENA--AND A NEW POPULARITY

Here’s an ‘80s/’90s relationship triangle for you: cable sports networks, summertime and promoters of sports that once were all but ignored.

Since ESPN’s birth in 1979, cable sports networks have been hard-pressed to find programming to fill their schedules. This problem is acute in the summer, off-season for such staples as college sports and pro basketball and hockey. Some networks have the luxury of major league baseball, but others, including Prime Ticket, don’t.

The solution has been a steady diet of leagues and tours ignored by the broadcast networks. They often come with low or no rights fees and low or no production costs. And they relish the opportunity for television exposure.

So a hearty cable welcome to Arena Football, Team Tennis, Canadian Football League, World Basketball League and the biggest success story of all, professional beach volleyball.

Pro beach volleyball was born in 1976 with the $5,000 World Championships of Beach Volleyball at Pacific Palisades. This year the Assn. of Volleyball Professionals will conduct a $2 million, 24-stop tour, bankrolled mostly by two alcoholic-beverage concerns.

“Cable TV has helped us immensely,” AVP President Jon Stevenson said. “Prime Ticket is the cable network that has ridden the wave of beach volleyball with us. It’s a real nice fit in the direction they wanted to go in their programming and (it) in turn helped our growth.”

Prime Ticket airs volleyball at 7 p.m. Monday and 8 p.m. Wednesday and has proven to be a boon to the network.

“The objective for a regional network is to find niche programming that really reflects our regional lifestyle,” said Don Corsini, Prime Ticket’s vice president of programming and production. “Professional beach volleyball is very, very important for us. It has proven to be extremely popular in our region.”

Prime Ticket, which serves Southern California, Arizona, Hawaii and Nevada, also has helped foster the growth of beach volleyball by distributing the telecasts to other regional cable sports networks throughout the nation.

“In regions that you would never think beach volleyball would be popular, it has grown immensely,” Corsini said. “You wouldn’t think individuals in New York or Chicago would really appreciate the California lifestyle, but beach volleyball has become extremely popular and is becoming more popular. The California mystique, feel, the festive colors and bikinis all make it so significant.”

The circuit is no longer confined to Southern California but stops at such unbeach-like locales as Indianapolis, Cleveland and Fort Worth, Tex.

Both men’s and women’s volleyball are seen on ESPN’s “Hot Summer Nights” package of water and beach sports programming Monday nights.

“Volleyball is an interesting and exciting game, and when you put healthy-looking people in swimsuits with lots of fan reaction, you get a good television product,” said Loren Matthews, ESPN senior vice president in charge of programming. “We weren’t surprised. We’d like to think we were an unspoken force in beach volleyball’s growth.”

Flush with its success on cable, beach volleyball makes its network debut on Sept. 1., when NBC airs a tape of the $200,000 U.S. Beach Volleyball Championships from Hermosa Beach.

“That’s a real big step for us,” Stevenson said. “So many more people will see our sport. Hermosa Beach is traditionally our best-attended event, and the fact that network TV will be there will make the crowds even bigger. We’re going to have a history-making event.”