TRURO — The sun beats down on an 81-degree Sunday at Ballston Beach. The southwest wind whips, and the net writhes. It’s a battle against the elements at beach volleyball games this summer, where a community of devotees — part-timers and year-rounders, middle-schoolers, millennials, and octogenarians — thrives as always.
But there’s an air of indignation and mourning this year: the games have been relocated from Longnook Beach, where they were always held. Players are partial to Longnook because of its high dune, which they say protects against sun and wind — but the dune’s erosion is precisely the reason why the beach is closed indefinitely.
Thor Yingling, 21, of Truro started playing at Longnook when he was 11. He’s gone from being the most elementary player to being the best. At Nauset High, he quit football and asked to join the women’s volleyball team — there was no men’s team — and became a four-year fixture, winding up as one of the captains.
“I wanted to play no matter what,” says Yingling, now an outside hitter on the men’s volleyball team at Emmanuel College. He’s drawn back to the less competitive scene in Truro each year by familiar faces and a love of the sport.
Franklin Amzallag, 80, reclines shoreside in his aviators. He plays between two and four matches a day, he says, down from six or eight back in the day. He’s been playing beach volleyball in Truro since the early aughts.
The games Amzallag played as a youth in Casablanca, Morocco were “very sectarian,” he says: you needed to be good to play. He loves how the community functions here, where all are welcome regardless of skill level. Amzallag says he’s played every summer in Truro since 2002, when a pair of siblings got the games going at Longnook.
One of them, Teresa Fenichel, insists it was later — maybe 2006. Regardless, launching the tradition remains “one of my proudest things in life,” Fenichel says.
Fenichel was in her 20s, coming to Truro from Cambridge in the summers, when she and her brother Jesse started the games. In place of the heavy-duty webbing that demarcates court boundaries today, they used seaweed. “We wandered the beach asking random people if they’d join our games, and a lot of those people stuck around,” she says.
Raphael Richter, 39, has been playing for 15 years. He’s seated courtside, shaded by an Otentik beach tent, bumping the ball back and forth with his seven-year-old son Mica, who’s too young for the court.
“I wish I could play now,” says Mica. He expects to join in when he turns 12.
Richter, who grew up in Provincetown but now lives in Truro, returns to the games every summer. “In the divisive times we’ve been having in town, volleyball reminds us that we’re all one,” he says.
“Dada! Pay attention!” interrupts laser-focused Mica, who’s ready to pass the ball.
Sophie Yingling, Thor’s sister, joins volleyball weekly and cherishes the time with her siblings, niece, and cousins. “It’s a moment in our crazy summer when we know we can all be together,” she says. “We were raised by a village of adults; it’s fun to be the adults in these kids’ lives.”
Many grown players know the feeling of watching kids evolve over the years from struggling to send the ball over the net to surpassing the adults who taught them. “That’s been pretty wild and amazing to see,” says Fenichel. Thor is a prime example.
“Thor took me under his wing and taught me everything I know about volleyball,” says Henry Rubin, 16, of New York City, who spends summers in Truro. At 13, Rubin was too nervous to get on the court. Thor, five years his senior, comforted him by explaining how he’d once been Rubin’s age and nervous, too.
Izzy Dunne wasn’t a kid when she entered the scene 10 years ago at Longnook, but she was an amateur. “I’d never really done sports, didn’t have the hand-eye coordination down,” the 37-year-old says. With the help of uber-welcoming “commissioner” Fenichel, Dunne stepped onto the court. A decade later, Dunne’s capacities have reached new heights. “I totally get why people love playing sports now,” she says.
While players hunker down in the Ballston squalls, the town is monitoring the dunes at Longnook with a drone. The beach remains closed as officials continue to evaluate land movement there.
Play is “super frustrating today because of the wind,” says Eric Stoddard of East Lyme, Conn., who spends a few weeks every summer in Truro religiously playing beach volleyball. He describes the wind as “an extra opponent.”
Thor Yingling doesn’t like that people can see the courts from their houses near Ballston, nor that there’s cell service. That splinters the blissful off-the-gridness of Longnook, which he says offered “separation from the world.”
“Longnook is the nicest, closest, best beach” Amzallag insists, relative to where he lives the rest of the year — Montreal. In early August, he’s hosting his friend Yves, who’s on his fourth trip to the Outer Cape from France. He’s made the trip repeatedly because Amzallag’s enthusiasm for Truro beaches is “très contagieux.”
Every year, swaths of year-rounders and visitors come together again to serve, set, and spike at the beach. There’s no need to text or call. “You just show up, and you have friends there,” says Dunne. “New people show up sometimes for a spell on the court, and some of those stick around for years, then decades.”
“All these subgroups of adults and kids,” says Sophie Yingling, “we all meet at the waterline.”
