Even though Manhattan High School is a 6A school with hundreds of students in attendance that like sports, there is only one sport that offers intramurals for them: basketball. Seniors John Ostermann and Dawson Stewart decided that should change and began to make a sand volleyball league.

The summer following their sophomore year, Stewart, Ostermann and others attended a Young Life camp where they played a lot of sand volleyball.

“It was one of our favorite things to do there and you know since then we’ve really liked doing it and we’ve enjoyed when we play,” Ostermann said.

This year Stewart initially brought up the idea of making the sand volleyball league to add and make a short list of intramurals at MHS.

“It’s our senior year and we don’t have to do anything in the spring now because basketball season is over for us so we needed something to fill our time so we decided to start a sand volleyball league,” Ostermann said

Originally the boys wanted the league to be school sponsored like basketball intramurals. Unfortunately with not a lot of time on their hands because of senior year coming to a close they couldn’t accomplish that goal.

“We talked to [athletic director Mike] Marsh and he told us for that to happen we’d have to make it a club and making things a club in our school is a long process,”Ostermann said. “We’d have to go through a lot of hoops.”

The league has 13 teams of around seven students on each team. The first set of games were held on April 18 at City Park on the sand courts. Each day there are games scheduled, the usual times are 4pm, 5pm, 6pm and 7pm, holding about 8 games a night. They are headed into the fifth week of games this week.

Just like other sports leagues, they will go into bracket play for each team to participate in to find a winner. As of right now Ostermann and Stewart are not sure of a prize for the winners, because they both don’t want to pay for things out of their own pocket they had to brainstorm ideas.

“We were talking about some of the teams just doing a little fee like one or two dollars each player and then being able to buy t-shirts for the winning team maybe something like that,” Ostermann said.