Overview:
Jon Lee has worn many caps in the sport of volleyball, from player to coach, and journalist to founder of a popular summer beach camp
It was love at first sight for the young, sporty, UC Santa Barbara student from the San Fernando Valley when he discovered Santa Barbara’s East Beach during the 1960s.
“To play volleyball, I’d always had to take the bus down Wilshire from UCLA where my dad worked during the summers,” Jon Lee recalled. “Or I had to park my car at the top of the hill and walk down Pacific Coast Highway to Sorrento Beach.
“It was my big prelude to a day of beach volleyball.”
But Lee found instant nirvana when he ventured from the student village of Isla Vista, cruised through town onto Cabrillo Boulevard, and spotted volleyball nets sprouting from the sand just beyond the seaside arts pavilion.
“I went, ‘Oh my God, you can park right here! … And it’s free! … And you can jump right on the courts … and dive right into the ocean when you’re done!’” he told Noozhawk.
“The community was receptive, and it was heaven for a volleyball player.”
It was the epiphany that inspired Lee to become the Archangel Gabriel of East Beach, trumpeting the virtues of volleyball for more than a half-century.
Lee’s evolution in volleyball went from that of player into high school coach and English teacher, magazine writer and editor, historian, ESPN television commentator, worldwide ambassador and — perhaps most enduringly — as founder and director of the East Beach Volleyball Camp for the youth of Santa Barbara.
The Friends of East Beach Association will honor that legacy at 10 a.m. Oct. 5 when it dedicates the “Jon Lee Court” at the venue where he dedicated a good chunk of his life.
The stainless steel standards and nylon nets of Lee’s court will abut others already dedicated to such volleyball legends as the late Henry Bergmann, Olympian Karch Kiraly, Paul Hodgert, Kathy Gregory and Kathy Hanley.
Lee pointed out that Hanley’s brother, John, “has the one that will be right next to mine.”
“Those guys were all at the very top of the beach world,” he said. “I was their partner in many of the drives up and down the coast for some of their glories.
“But I think the summer beach camp is the thing that I’m singularly proud of more than just my performance as a player.”
Family Ties
Lee’s own development as a player began with his father.
Marvin Lee had starred in both basketball and volleyball at UCLA during the 1940s.
His playing career was cut short when he was wounded in the leg by machine gun fire during the Korean War, but he returned home to coach basketball and teach history at Reseda High School.
His sons wound up becoming two of his star athletes.
“My brother, Greg, and I were always touching a volleyball, back and forth, when we were very young,” he said. “We were playing every sport available, whether it was just throwing a Frisbee or playing three flies up, hitting the ball in the street, or playing football.
“We had a tennis court in our backyard, which we also used as basketball court, with a good hoop down at one end.
“The whole neighborhood always played there.”
Greg Lee also excelled in beach volleyball, winning a record of 13 consecutive pro tournament titles with partner Jim Menges.
He was inducted into the California Beach Volleyball Association Hall of Fame in 1997. Jon followed his brother into that Hall of Fame two years ago.
Greg Lee was perhaps best known, however, as the starting point guard for UCLA’s NCAA championship men’s basketball teams of 1972 and 1973.
He set an NCAA tournament record of 14 assists while setting up the likes of Bill Walton and Santa Barbara’s Keith “Jamaal” Wilkes in the Bruins’ 87-66 victory Memphis in the 1973 title game.
Brother Jon led UCSB to its own claim of national fame by winning the 1969 collegiate championship sponsored by the U.S. Volleyball Association.
The NCAA began sanctioning the sport the following year.
“We beat UCLA in the championship game,” recalled Lee, who won USVBA All-America honors three straight years. “I always felt, ‘That’s a victory for the pure life of Santa Barbara, beating the city folks of Los Angeles.’”
It all came together for the Gauchos, he said, when “Tim Bonynge walked into the gym and became the middle blocker that we needed.”
“We had Dave Shoji, who coached for 50 years at the University of Hawai‘i,” Lee added. “He was a super-good player.
“Chris Roberts, Jon Roberts’ older brother, was one of our middles, and Steve Sterling was our sweet little setter from Manhattan (Beach).
“We had two good setters and two good middles, and Tim Klein and I were the outside hitters.”
Beach Party
Lee continued his indoor volleyball career overseas by leading Mallorca to the Spanish national championship in 1974. He also played in the now-defunct International Volleyball Association in 1975 for his hometown Santa Barbara Spikers.
But he also made sure to keep some sand in the game.
Lee won the coveted “AAA” beach volleyball rating soon after his graduation from UCSB in 1970.
He traveled the beach tour from 1971 to 1982 before it was absorbed by the Association of Volleyball Professionals.
Lee finished second in three tournaments, third in four others and lower than fifth only once in the 26 tournaments he entered.
He still laughs about his brief partnership with a young Kiraly, who would eventually win a record 148 tournaments as well as a gold medal in beach volleyball at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.
“We got a fifth in a tournament one time, and then I dumped Karch the next week,” he said. “I told him, ‘I’m used to taking third or fourth.’
“He got a second in the next tournament and zipped right past me in the beach pantheon.”
Lee won his third-straight 60-plus Sand National Championship in 2015. He didn’t stop playing until he turned 71 during the shutdown days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
He made his mark as much with the written word as he did with his patented “knuckle-pokey shot.” Volleyball Magazine hired him as a senior editor to cover the very tournaments in which he played.
“I’d take a third or fifth and then write an article about the tournament,” he said with a laugh. “It was an insider’s view … Real Gonzo journalism.
“I had to really balance that because it’s a very competitive world.”
Royal Ascension
Lee taught English and writing at San Marcos High School while also coaching its boys and girls volleyball teams for 23 years, from 1986 to 2009.
He won California Interscholastic Association-Southern Section championships with the boys in both 1991 and 1999, and another with the girls in the fall of 1999.
Todd Rogers, an Olympic champion in beach volleyball in 2008, and Dax Holdren, who placed fifth at the 2004 Athens Games, both played on his San Marcos team of 1991.
“It’s amazing how my coaching success changed course radically when I got those guys,” Lee said with a laugh. “Dax was actually a baseball pitcher — a lefthander, and really athletic — whom I convinced to play volleyball.
“He had a great time because he’d play with Todd down at the beach.”
But Lee was just as proud recently to watch two of his former players — Dwayne Hauschild of San Marcos High and Kristin Hempy of Santa Barbara High — match wits as coaches in an indoor girls volleyball contest.
“Most of the kids on both sides of the net had gone to the beach camp,” he noted. “That camp definitely became part of the sport’s fabric in Santa Barbara.”
The summer beach camp started as a simple family affair during the summer of 1991.
“My brother, Greg, and his wife would come up with their kids and we’d go to the beach and run a volleyball camp for 20 or 30 people,” Lee said.
“The impetus for us two teachers was to make enough money in two or three weeks to be able to go up Yosemite and camp in Tuolumne Meadows.”
Lee and his wife, Lynette, are the parents of two children, Solana and Jansen.
Sugaring Up the Sand
The camp’s popularity grew steadily during Lee’s three decades as director. Attendance reached as high as 161 campers.
The English teacher in Lee couldn’t resist starting each camp morning with a “vocabulary word of the day.”
But he also sweetened the pot by awarding candy to the first camper who spotted a dolphin offshore.
“Some kids got hit by a volleyball now and then while looking at the ocean, but I guess it was worth it if you got some Starbursts or a bag of Skittles,” Lee said. “There was a balance there of trying to keep it light-hearted and fun and not too arduous.
“You do develop not just skills but rather an affection for the game. It’s changed a lot of people’s lives.”
Many others were tutored as coaches at the beach camp. More than 50 of his former campers, camp coaches, and high school players have coached in high school or college.
They include Rogers, the Olympic gold medalist, who is now the beach volleyball coach at Cal Poly.
“Miles Evans, who just played in the Olympics, was one of the coaches at my camp,” Lee pointed out. “A lot of people got their first paychecks in the sport at the camp.
“They had to be on time and learn some workplace skills. They had to interact with people — with parents — and so it was a good testing ground to see if they really wanted to coach.”
Jordon Dyer, the current director of the East Beach Volleyball Camp, got his coaching start at the camp.
“He was a really good player and a really good kid, and now he’s got a great business presence in volleyball,” Lee said. “I’ve got people coaching in Illinois and Florida and Kansas City, too.
“They’re now part of the volleyball world elsewhere, conveying that enthusiasm and love of the game.”
World of Difference
Lee spread the seeds of volleyball even outside of America. He’s made four trips to Africa to build courts and teach the game.
“They needed balls wherever you went, so I’d bring 10 or 12 from volleyball camp and distribute them,” he said. “They usually had to play soccer and other sports with just banana leaves wrapped up in vines.
“They’d play volleyball with the ones I brought, although I’m sure they’d turn into soccer balls as soon as I left.”
Volleyball stoked the wanderlust in Lee.
“I lived and played in Spain and traveled around the world as a journalist to places like Russia, Cuba, Japan and Brazil,” he said. “It was especially gratifying to be an American emissary for the sport.”
And it will bring Lee back full-circle to East Beach on Saturday.
“It’s retained its innocence,” he said. “You can drive right up there and play all day with nothing but adrenalin and ambition … That’s all it takes to play at East Beach.
“It’s remained beautiful, with that (Clark Estate) house at the point and no hotels checkering the shoreline.”
Little has changed there through the sands of time.
