HOLDING COURT: Dennis Collins reflects on his four decades teaching beach volleyball for the City of Hermosa Beach

ORIGINAL EASY READER STORY BY GARTH MEYER

“If you guys don’t come back from this drill looking like sugared donuts, we’re going to make you look like sugared donuts ourselves.”

“That’s a Pier to Pier swim for you Evan, for that mishit.”

“Football, football, football, ballet.”

Dennis Collins has been a Hermosa Beach Parks and Recreation volleyball teacher since 1986.

He also coaches the Peninsula High School boys beach team. Late this summer, he did both from a seated position after a motorcycle accident put him in a wheelchair for 10 weeks.

When he started teaching, Collins worked 40 hours per week at Hughes Aircraft in environmental health and safety compliance. On top of that, he did another kind of training – 30-40 hours per week as a volleyball player, seeking the AVP.

One day, a guy asked him to cover a class for Manhattan Beach Parks and Rec.

“I never imagined the joy of giving feedback, and improving people’s games. It moved me,” Collins said. “It’ll be 40 years in January.”

He never played volleyball until after high school. The Aviation High School Hall of Famer played defensive back on the football team, and ran track. He tied the school record in the 220 meters. So “football-football-football-ballet” is his way to instruct volleyball players to stay low, explode toward a ball and make a soft hit.

“I’m teaching the Peninsula team now to hit that off-switch at the last moment,” he said.

Ballet was also first-hand knowledge for Collins, he was a dance minor at El Camino College, where, in his first year with the football team, a fractured vertebrae at practice led him to stop playing.

So he took up volleyball.

“Immediately, I fell in love with the sport,” he said.

“Dancin’ D”

Collins tells of certain things in his classes; a moonball serve to counter the advantage of particularly tall opponents; of Jim Menges, the 6-foot-2 UCLA All-American setter and beach legend who would say, “You’re only as good as your deep ball.” 

Collins learned to coach mostly on his own.

“Back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, there wasn’t a lot of (materials),” he said. “So you were forced to come up with your own stuff. Coaching kind of married together dance with the science, and ergonomics from work.”

He has a masters degree in Environmental Health & Safety from Cal State-Northridge. Collins became a certified ergonomist while at DIRECTV, from which he retired in 2015.

“I got an early parachute and took it,” he said.

Along the way, the dance brought in money too. In the ‘80s and early ‘90s, known as “Dancin’ D,” Collins entered contests in South Bay bars, as far down as Long Beach, working it 45 seconds at a time to Prince’s “Erotic City,” “Kiss” and “Computer Blue.”

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