A Winning Prototype : Beach Volleyball Star Kent Steffes Dominates Along With Kiraly, and His Harder, Smarter Approach Is Catching On

Kent Steffes was a straight-A student at Pacific Palisades High until he got a B in a volleyball class as a senior.

“I missed the class a lot because I was at basketball practice,” he said.

Basketball will always be his first love, but it’s fun making big bucks playing volleyball. At 26, Steffes is one of the world’s best pro beach players.

He was a solid forward on the Palisades basketball team, but on the volleyball court, he really stood out. As an all-state senior middle blocker in 1986, he led the Dolphins to a 38-0 record and the State title.

Steffes has made history on the beach tour with a meteoric rise that has made him the youngest player to have won more than $1 million in prize money.

He ranks fourth in all-time victories with 68 tournament titles. The three players ahead of him Sinjin Smith, Randy Stoklos and Karch Kiraly--are each at least seven years older.

Smith, 37, has won 135 opens. Stoklos, 33, has 120 titles and Kiraly, also 33, has 93.

Steffes, 6 feet 4 and 210 pounds, attributes some of the success to an early start on the beach. He started his full-time career at 19, when most players are still competing in school, because his college career had ended abruptly.

Steffes accepted a scholarship to Stanford after high school but transferred to UCLA after a year because the Cardinal had a losing season and he believed the program would not improve.

He sat out a year as required by the NCAA for transferring athletes, then played through the Bruins’ 1989 nonconference schedule before learning he was ineligible because his partner had accepted money in a beach volleyball tournament during the summer.

“I didn’t take any money, but the NCAA said that made us a pro team and you can’t play on a pro team,” Steffes said. “It was ridiculous and very disappointing. My whole career was taken away.”

UCLA Coach Al Scates believes the ruling was absurd because Steffes proved he was clean. Steffes was a starter who could have helped the Bruins dominate, Scates said, but the team was still great without him.

“Kent had unlimited potential,” Scates said. “He looked very good and I was going to use him as a key player. But it didn’t work out.”

So Steffes turned to the sand, where he has proven to be a natural. He and partner Kiraly have been tearing it up on the Assn. of Volleyball Professionals tour since they joined forces in the middle of the 1991 season.

They got together when Kiraly, a two-time U.S. Olympic gold medalist, returned from an Italian pro indoor league. In ’91 they won six of 11 tournaments, in ’92 16 of 19 and last season they won an AVP-record 18 events.

“We’ve been winning at a rate never before seen,” Steffes said. “And every time we lose, it’s news.”

The team has continued to dominate this year, even though a bruised kidney forced Kiraly to miss four events. Steffes sat out two of them and teamed up with Scott Ayakatubby for the other two.

Kiraly and Steffes have won 14 tournaments this year and are seeded No. 1 in this weekend’s $250,000 Miller Lite Championships at Hermosa Beach.

The 48-team event begins today at 9 a.m. and the final is scheduled for 2 p.m. Sunday. Steffes and Kiraly have won the title the last two years.

Although the season is not yet complete, Steffes has already locked in the $100,000 bonus pool awarded the player with the most points each year. He has won the pool three times, once with Kiraly and twice alone.

“Kent is not the best at anything, but he’s excellent at everything,” said Chris Marlowe, an ’84 Olympic gold medalist in volleyball and television commentator of the sport. “He can really do everything well, and that’s what sets him apart.”

Steffes is also known for his sophisticated workout routine.

It includes a rigorous weight and conditioning program that is mapped out in detail long before the start of every season.

“He trains harder and smarter than anybody else on the beach, so he’s more prepared,” Kiraly said. “He’s incredibly dedicated and he has no weaknesses.”

Mike Dodd, winner of 63 opens, says Steffes is the prototype of the new player. Dodd, 37, has faced Steffes and Kiraly in five tournament finals this year and has won three opens with partner Mike Whitmarsh.

A Manhattan Beach native, Dodd has lived through the sport’s evolution. When he started, athletes got T-shirts and beach chairs for winning tournaments.

With more at stake, he anticipates more and more athletes following Steffes’ routine--no partying, a strict training regimen and a more businesslike attitude.

“Kent is incredibly focused and incredibly dedicated,” Dodd said. “He has specific goals and purposes, and that’s unique.”

Steffes started playing volleyball when he was 15, an age when most kids have already played on club teams for several years. He relied on natural athletic ability to hold his own.

His father, Jackson, ran track at Michigan and his mother, Sandra, was a field hockey player.

If he had not succeeded in volleyball, Steffes would probably be working at a financial firm.

He earned a degree in economics at UCLA last year, has a serious interest in the stock market and manages his own investments.

In fact, the first thing he does every morning is watch the Dow Jones industrial average on Channel 22. Then he switches to CNBC, a station that runs a continual market summary.

“I always thought I’d be successful at whatever I’d do,” Steffes said. “That’s one thing I don’t lack--confidence.”

He even has it during pickup basketball games. Hoops will always be an important part of his life. He didn’t ruin his perfect grade-point average for nothing.