Ticas Do Well in Beach Volleyball
by Rod Hughes
Why women’s beach volleyball is not a major sport like soccer, basketball, American football and baseball, is a mystery to us. You have four toasted, athletic young women bouncing on the sand dressed in the legal minimum. Yet, few fans sit in the stands, mostly young men with tongues sunburned from hanging out of their mouths lustfully.
But even the excellent sports section of the daily Al Dia relegated the fine performance of Costa Rica’s women’s volleyball team to the back pages, buried in a nest of small ads. But only the Cubans were able to best Ingrid Morales and Natalia Alfaro in the first phase of the NORCECA regional tour held in the Dominican Republic last weekend.
Perhaps a bit of machismo was at work here, since Al Dia’s report of the miserable performance of the two male teams, fifth and eleventh, was confined to a small box headlined: “They Lack a Little Something.”
Flushed by a second place in international tournament, plus exertion under the hot sun, Ingrid and Natalia go on to the second phase of the NORCECA tour in Guatemala April 16-21, on to El Salvador April 25-27 and on through Mexico, Aruba, Puerto Rico until the final tourney in Trinidad Tobago May 30-June 1. A grueling schedule indeed. Good luck to them and watch out for the boys in the stands.