This is an updated version of a story published by Noozhawk.com at bit.ly/45kMboh and is being re-run with the website’s permission.
East Beach may be a playground, but twin sisters Kelly and Lisa Strand had to work their way there a half-century ago.
They’d follow their older siblings by riding their bikes for six miles, packing nothing but a sack lunch and the hunger to play some beach volleyball.
“We wouldn’t even bring a towel, just an apple and a peanut butter sandwich,” recalled Kelly, who was a junior-high teen at the time. “We’d stay all day.”
Older brother Warren and sister Kathy were often already there.
They’d be holding court with such local volleyball gentry as Karch Kiraly, a future Olympic gold medalist in both the indoor and beach games.
It took countless hours of playing and pestering before the little sisters were included with all the “Queen Kathies of the Beach”: Kathy Gregory, Kathy Hanley and sister Kathy Strand.
“There was definitely a pecking order,” Lisa told Noozhawk. “We worked hard to get to play on the big girl court. We’d beg people to let us play. Thank God we were twins because we always had each other to play with.”
Lisa and Kelly were paired again May 31, when the Friends of East Beach Association dedicated “Strand Court” in their honor.
The organization has dedicated itself to improving the 16 permanent courts at East Beach. It renovated the first one in the name of the late Henry Bergmann in 2010. Other courts have been named in honor of Kiraly, siblings John and Kathy Hanley, Gregory, Paul Hodgert and Jon Lee.
“It’s a pretty proud moment for us,” said Kelly, known now by her married name of Kelly Van Winden. “It’s really cool because the name of the court will be the Strand Court. I just love that my family gets to be honored.”
Don of an era
Kelly and Lisa caught the volleyball bug while watching their siblings star for coach Rick Olmstead’s indoor teams at Santa Barbara High School.
Brother Warren played with Kiraly and Hanley on the Dons’ CIF Southern Section championship boys team of 1978.
“We’d go and watch all those games as the tag-along little sisters,” Kelly said. “It was so much fun. Warren and our sister, Kathy, were really good friends with Karch. They were always together, all three of those guys.”
Their father, Leon Strand, even hired Kiraly to help dig the foundation for their house.
“Our dad was the one who was always driving us to the beach or taking us to the park for tennis lessons,” Kelly said. “He taught us how to swim. He wanted us to be active and all of that.”
Their father, who died last October, also took them sailing, skiing, and even backpacking in the mountain ranges of the High Sierra.
“He got us involved with a youth church group,” Lisa said. “He was trying to raise us up right and keep us out of trouble, so he kept us busy. We all had to get jobs pretty young … He had us pay for all our shoes and skis.”
He also facilitated their passion for volleyball.
“We’d stay up late in the front yard rallying, so our dad set up a night light,” Lisa said. “With only one volleyball, we had to wait till Warren and Kathy were done to go out and rally.”
Kelly and Lisa, like their older siblings, played for Olmstead at Santa Barbara High. They were both named to the All-CIF Southern Section Division 4A First Team during their senior season in the autumn of 1980.
“I don’t remember how far we went into the CIF playoffs every year, but I do remember all the fun we had and what great shape we were in,” Lisa said. “Our biggest rival was San Marcos. We’d go to Frimple’s for breakfast and do car rallies down State Street prior to those games.”
Girls volleyball at that time was in only its ninth year of sanction by the California Interscholastic Federation.
“I didn’t even recognize how lucky I was at the time, I was just riding the wave,” Kelly said. “It was like these doors opened and I just walked through them. I’m not saying that it didn’t come with hard work — the drive to play the game came from inside — but I had no idea about all of that.”
The twins also had no clue that volleyball could be the path to a college scholarship. Olmstead took them aside after their senior season to show them an envelope full of recruiting letters that had been addressed to them.
“He told us, ‘I want you to look through this … You can go to college to play volleyball,’” Kelly said. “We were like, ‘What are you talking about? Are you crazy?’ We had no idea. We were just playing the game.”
The next level
Kelly first went to UC Santa Barbara, serving as a team captain her sophomore season, before transferring to Cal Poly.
She earned first-team all-league honors in 1984 and led the Mustangs to a 32-8 record and the championship of the Pacific Coast Athletic Association, which was later renamed the Big West Conference.
Lisa, a versatile middle blocker, enjoyed even greater success at the University of Hawai‘i, earning All-America honors in both 1982 and 1983 while leading the Rainbow Wahine to back-to-back NCAA championships.
But both twins were just getting started with their lives in volleyball.
Kelly was the head coach at Bishop Diego High School in Santa Barbara in 1987 and directed and helped start the Napa Valley Volleyball Club in 1988. After serving as an assistant coach at Sonoma State University in 1989 and 1990, she was SSU’s head coach from 1991 to 2000 and was a three-time Northern California Athletic Conference Coach of the Year in 1993, 1995 and 1997.
She was Napa Valley College’s head coach from 2001 to 2015, earning Bay Valley Conference Coach of the Year honors in 2004, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2010 and 2011, and was the head coach at Napa High School from 2016 to 2019.
Kelly also has a background as a professional volleyball player, having played indoor volleyball from 1987 to 1989 as an outside hitter for the San Jose Golddiggers, a team in Major League Volleyball that home matches at the San Jose Civic Auditorium.
She played three seasons in the Women’s Professional Volleyball Association as a beach volleyball player from 1989 to 1992 and competed in a Bud Light 4-Person Beach League from 1989 to 1996.
Lisa also competed in Major League Volleyball and on the Bud Light circuit. She also played on the Association of Volleyball Professionals Tour.
She partnered with Janice Opalinski in 1990 to win the AVP’s Salem Fresh Tokyo Tournament — the richest tour event of that year.
They also got busy starting families.
Kelly married her college sweetheart, Cal Poly basketball player Jim Van Winden. Their daughters, Adlee and Torrey, both earned AVCA All-America honors at their parents’ alma mater after starring at Vintage High School.
“Much as we exposed our kids to other things, they chose the sport,” Kelly said. “We sort of led them all away from it, but at the same time they all chased it … They all fell in love with it.”
Torrey now plays on the AVP Tour with cousin Katie Spieler, Kathy’s daughter.
Her sister, now known by the married name of Adlee Kass, also still plays volleyball and is expecting her first child this summer.
“She plans on playing six months pregnant in the Santa Barbara Open,” Kelly said.
Lisa and former University of Hawai‘i men’s volleyball star Pono Ma’a are the parents of four former collegiate volleyball stars: Misty (Miami), Micah (UCLA), Mehana (UCSB) and Maluhia (Kent State).
Micah Ma’a made the Men’s National Team as a setter and helped the United States win a bronze medal at last summer’s Olympic Games in Paris.
“I went to Paris with Warren, Kathy and Kelly,” said Lisa, who’s served as a color analyst the last two decades for University Hawai‘i volleyball telecasts. “We spent 12 days there and it was the most incredible trip I’ve ever been on.”
She claims that watching her children play volleyball doesn’t make her nervous even when an Olympic medal is at stake.
“I am just happy that they loved the sport,” Lisa said.
Beach party
East Beach has always been their happy place.
Kelly and Jim even held their wedding reception at a venue that overlooked the area.
“East Beach was just such a comfortable place to be,” Kelly said. “It was like my backyard growing up. We’d go down there without a towel … Lie in the sand … Then we’d dive into the ocean, come back out, and lie in the sand once more to get warm.”
Lisa recalled that time as “those lazy, crazy days when all you’d do is play and then swim in the ocean. It was like our yard … Our front yard and our back yard. We lived to go down there and play.”
She also remembered how satisfying it was when they were accepted by the older players.
“If you lost, you had to wait like forever to get another chance,” she explained, “so it helped with our motivation, and trained us to always win.”
Kelly, who still coaches aspiring players on the sand court that Jim built in their backyard, said “all those women at East Beach have no idea of how influential they were, and in so many ways. They were so wonderful and kind, 99% of the time, to everybody in my family. That was pretty huge.”
And it’s something she and her sister have devoted themselves to paying back, over and over again.
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