Jon Lee... Legendary Player and Coach

Beach Volleyball Hall of Famer Jon Lee has semi-jokingly referred to East Beach as his “office” for several decades, and he has earned that right through a countless variety of far-reaching contributions to the East Beach volleyball community and well beyond. He has enriched the community as a player, coach, camp leader, teacher, commentator, writer, historian, sage, referee, story-teller, wit, game broker, ambassador, and friend to all who come near.

In 1966 Jon arrived at UCSB (where, according to his Facebook profile, he studied “Left side hitting”), following what must certainly deserve a high ranking among the worst decisions in college admissions history as he did not meet the academic standard to attend his first choice of college, UC Irvine. Irvine’s loss was Santa Barbara’s gain, and Jon has been at the core of of maintaining Santa Barbara’s reputation as a prime volleyball hotbed ever since.

For all the many laurels he achieved as a player and coach, his strongest impact on East Beach has likely been the founding and running of the Jon Lee Beach Volleyball camp every summer for 30 years from 1991 to 2021. Many of us or our children were among the tens of thousands of youth from Santa Barbara and elsewhere who attended those weekly camps. In addition to learning volleyball skills, they learned the joy of watching out for dolphins (a prize of Skittles to the first person to spot them), the benefits of sunscreen, and how to have a really fun day at the beach, all while learning a few new vocabulary words. Every Friday the week would culminate in a cleverly-named tournament, such as “Doctors of Pepper”, “Fruit of the Gloom” (after a foggy week), and “Odor on the Courts” (after a skunk sighting). Jon has a gift for being able to show that it’s “cool” to be scholarly as well as good at volleyball, and brought that great gift to an entire generation of youth.

Besides teaching the campers how to play and have fun, the camps also gave many local volleyball-playing youngsters their first jobs as assistants, where they learned important lessons about responsibility, communication, and punctuali- ty, and gained coaching experience.

As an indoor player at UCSB, Jon was a three-time All-American for the Gauchos, and an integral part of the 1969 national championship team.

This was followed by a couple years of playing professionally in Spain (winning more championships) and for the Santa Barbara Spikers of the International Volleyball Association.

He carried his passion for volleyball to the sand, and was an elite player for more than a decade, in the days before you could make money at the sport. Partners included his highly accomplished brother Greg, as well as other notables such as Don Shaw and up-and-comers Karch Kiraly and John Hanley. Always a talented wordsmith, Jon parlayed his love of language as well as volleyball into a job as Senior Editor for Volleyball Magazine, and became the lead volleyball announcer for ESPN.

After returning to UCSB to coach volleyball and earn his teaching credential, Jon embarked on a career as a highly successful English teacher and volleyball coach at San Marcos High School from 1986 to 2009.

His accomplishments in 23 years as a coach of both boys and girls were rich with championships of the always tough Channel League, and three CIF-Southern Section championships. Players coached by him went on to such feats as becoming Olympians in beach volleyball (gold medalist Todd Rogers, Dax Holdren), playing for the USA national indoor team (Brook Billings, Jeff Menzel), and numerous beach volleyball professionals such as Rogers, Holdren and Anthony Medel. Most telling of all, more than 50 of his former players later went on to become volleyball coaches themselves. His coaching career culminated in the court of the San Marcos gym being named Jon Lee Court.

More recently Jon has been spreading the volleyball gospel by bringing the game to children in Africa through a series of visits.

Throughout the years Jon has continued to be a strong and constant presence at East Beach. Ever the teacher, his perfecting of the “knuckle pokey” shot led many an opponent to declare the human knuckle to be an obscene body part as they lay cursing, sprawled in the sand after a futile effort to chase down one of his shots.

You simply cannot find someone who has contributed more and in more ways to East Beach volleyball than Jon Lee.