NEPONSIT — A beach volleyball league has called off its summer matches because of a fight with the feds over storage space.
Organizers of the Rockaway Beach Volleyball League, which is in its 20th year at Riis Park, announced that all games were canceled until further notice after the National Park Service would not provide them space for equipment, they said.
"[NPS] has been stringing us along now since May," Steve Gifford, a league commissioner, said Wednesday after the second week of play was canceled.
Officials initially offered up two alternative spaces for the equipment — which includes 78 nets, volleyballs, shovels and buckets to pick up loose rocks from the beach — but reneged on that, too, league organizers said.
The league then ordered a storage pod to keep near the courts and planned to have it delivered Wednesday morning, Gifford added.
But they never heard from NPS so they had to call it off, informing the more than 1,000 players that the league would be canceled while they figured things out, they said.
A spokeswoman with the Gateway National Recreation Center, the local branch of NPS, said they are working with the league to find an alternative space.
Their former storage space, which the league said they paid thousands of dollars a year to rent, is now an outpost of Whit's End pizza.
"This should be resolved in one to two weeks, and we look forward to having the league, one of our great long-term community partners, back up and running," NPS spokeswoman Daphne Yun said.
The RBVL began 27 years ago as a handful of teams that played pick-up games at Beach 108th Street in Rockaway Beach.
As it grew, they moved to Riis Park, which at the time was nearly empty.
"It got popular last year and then they just pushed us out the door," Patty Moule, another commissioner, said at a league meeting Wednesday.
The group doesn't blame the Riis Park Bazaar, the newest tenant of the concession space, but instead the Park Service, which they say hasn't helped keep them on the beach.
"It is the Park Service's fault. They have not represented us," Moule said. "It's very upsetting for all of us."
