NEWS
Net gains
The mission of AVL Hoppers goes beyond volleyball courts
Fall
Nonprofit Feature
HOLDING THE LINE: The nonprofit AVL Hoppers operates competitive outdoor volleyball leagues, along with clinics and tournaments. Photo by Jason De Los Santos
BY JUSTIN McGUIRE jmcguire@mountainx.com Franklin Rodriguez wasn’t thinking about charitable giving when he signed up for AVL Hoppers. He just wanted to play volleyball. “I played in some other leagues, and people were like, ‘You should play Hoppers. It’s so much fun,’” the Asheville man says. “How I got involved was just word-of-mouth.” But Rodriguez soon found out AVL Hoppers wasn’t a typical recreational sports league. A nonprofit, the group defines its mission as using “our passion for volleyball as the catalyst for change in our community.” Each season, the group’s championship teams receive a prize in the form of a donation to a nonprofit of their choice. In all, AVL Hoppers has contributed more than $2,000 to such area organizations as Brother Wolf Animal Rescue, Helpmate, Blue Ridge Humane Society and Open Hearts Art Center. 6
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“We refer to this as ‘playing it forward,’” explains Brenda Galvan, president and co-founder of AVL Hoppers. When Rodriguez and teammate Sarah Jordan won the Hoppers’ Upper BB league in August, they were able to put the “play it forward” idea into action. They chose to earmark their $250 prize to Blue Ridge Pride. “It was cool to be able to donate to them because it’s a cause that’s personal to us. They do so many good things for the Asheville community,” he says. “I just want to help improve the lived experiences of people in the LGBTQ+ community because there are people out there trying to restrict equality and creating barriers to health care access, reducing free-speech expression and obscuring visibility.” Rodriguez’s experience of finding a place to play competitive volleyball while also giving back is exactly what Galvan and fellow volleyball enthusiasts Kenzie Kramer and
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Monica Rivas had in mind when they launched AVL Hoppers last summer. “I think that it’s created a really positive community because you’re playing for something positive at the end of the day and not just additional cash in your pocket like you would get in a lot of other leagues,” Kramer says. QUICK GROWTH AVL Hoppers runs eight-week seasons, plus playoffs, in the spring, summer and fall. Each doubles team is made up of one man and one woman, and the games are played on outdoor grass courts. Galvan, Kramer and Rivas got to know each other through Asheville’s burgeoning volleyball scene and soon started kicking around the idea of starting an outdoor coed doubles league. When Galvan played two seasons in a competitive league in Greenville, S.C.,
she got even more enthusiastic about the idea. “I was like, ‘Guys, we could do this here. It would work. I think people are really looking for an opportunity to play more competitive volleyball,’” she says. When she became pregnant and no longer wanted to make the weekly drive to Greenville, the three women launched AVL Hoppers with a series of weekly pickup games. Early results were modest, to say the least. “It was very small,” Galvan recalls. “We tried it a couple weeks, and at one point I told my husband, ‘This is not going to happen, people are not coming, we should just maybe forget about it.’ ” But the three women persisted, and soon so many people were showing up to the games they couldn’t accommodate them all on the four grass courts they were using at Carrier Park. They worked with Asheville Parks & Recreation to get access to more
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