On a Saturday morning in late summer, Dockweiler Beach fills with tents, coolers, and grown adults in matching neon jumpsuits arguing about whether their team skit needs another rehearsal before the noon match. Ask any of them where the Gillis Volleyball Tournament started and most will point north, toward the former Gillis neighborhood, much of which now lies beneath the runway apron.
Playa del Rey's beach culture has changed with its shoreline. The surf shifted, and the Gillis tournament continued as its playing locations changed.
The Break That Left First
Before any of this, Playa del Rey had actual surf. The north end of the beach, still called Toes Beach by longtime residents for the way surfers hung ten off the nose of a longboard, drew a serious crowd in the 1960s. Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson rode that break. Airline pilots and aerospace engineers who worked nearby had their pick of the neighborhood's white-tablecloth restaurants after a morning session.
The Marina del Rey breakwater changed that. Completed around 1965 to calm the wave action threatening the new marina development next door, it also flattened the swell that made Toes Beach worth surfing. The beach is still there. The surf that made it a destination isn't. Farther south along Dockweiler, the break holds up better, but the stretch that made Playa del Rey a name among surfers never came back.
The history of Playa del Rey's surf break adds another dimension to its beach culture: the community's connection to the coast continued even as the surf changed.
A Tournament Starts at Gillis Beach
Six years after the breakwater changed the surf, a different kind of beach culture took root a few blocks away. In 1971, brothers Steve and Dave Cressman organized a pickup volleyball tournament at Gillis Beach, a short stretch of sand named for the block-long street that dead-ended into it. Seventeen teams showed up that first year and played on a single court. Most of the participants were Westchester High and St. Bernard High kids who'd never played organized beach volleyball before. They just wanted to do it again next summer, so they did.
Three years later, LAX expanded its west runway in 1974, changing the shoreline around Gillis Street. The homes and streets were gone, but the beach remained.
The tournament didn't stop. It kept running on the same sand, now empty of houses, until 1980, when the city dredged the marina and dumped the spoils on Gillis Beach, burying the ten courts organizers had built up over the previous decade. That forced a move, this time a mile north to Toes Beach, the same stretch where the surf had died fifteen years earlier. The tournament stayed there for twenty five years. Then in 2005, the tournament moved south to Dockweiler Beach, where it has played since.
Here's the timeline laid out plainly:
| Year | What Happened | Where the Tournament Landed |
|---|---|---|
| 1971 | Founded by Steve and Dave Cressman, 17 teams on one court | Gillis Beach |
| 1974 | LAX west runway expansion changes the area around Gillis Street | Gillis Beach, tournament continues |
| 1980 | City dredges marina sand onto the beach, burying 10 courts | Moves to Toes Beach |
| 2005 | Tournament relocates | Moves to Dockweiler Beach |
Two relocations in thirty four years, and the tournament continued at each new location.
It Grew as the Tournament Changed Locations
The counterintuitive part is what happened to attendance. A tournament that changed locations twice might have shrunk or folded. Instead it grew. By its fortieth year, the Gillis had expanded from those original 17 teams on one court to roughly 170 teams and more than 600 players spread across 28 courts. Brackets multiplied along with the crowd. A skill tier called the Hoffy, named for an early organizer, gave less competitive players their own bracket. Father-daughter teams, six-person teams, and a bracket called the Centurions, where a team's combined age had to top 100, all got added as the event evolved.
The tournament has now run for more than fifty years, and it still isn't something you can just show up to. It's invitational, closed to walk-ons, and organizers have deliberately avoided growing its public profile beyond the people who already know about it. That's an unusual choice for an event this size. Most things that get this big start chasing wider audiences. The Gillis chased the opposite, staying a reunion for people who grew up in a neighborhood that, in its original physical form, doesn't exist anymore.
A memorial mural now marks the tournament's history, produced through the office of Councilwoman Traci Park with artwork by local artist Hector Rios. It stands as a physical record of the tournament's history and the people who have sustained it.
The Bar That Never Left
While the tournament bounced between three beaches, one thing in Playa del Rey stayed put. The Shack, a dive bar on Culver Boulevard a few blocks from the sand, changed hands in 1972, one year after the first Gillis tournament and two years before the runway expansion changed the area around the original beach. It's been under the same ownership ever since.
The Shack's annual chili cook off, held every August, has become one of the few fixed points on the Playa del Rey calendar that hasn't moved, been dredged, or been reassigned to a different beach. A newer rib cook off, held every June, joined the rotation more recently. Neither event tries to be more than what it is: a parking lot full of folding tables, ten or so competing chili recipes, and a crowd that includes surfers, bikers, and families out for a Saturday at the beach. The bar's own description of itself, built on decades of returning regulars rather than reinvention, echoes the neighborhood's mix of longtime traditions and ongoing change.
What the Lagoon Park Says About Right Now
The pattern hasn't stopped. The city's Department of Recreation and Parks recently resurfaced the two full-size basketball courts at Del Rey Lagoon Park, the fourteen-acre park a few blocks from the beach that anchors much of the neighborhood's daily foot traffic. The work came through a donation from the LA Clippers Foundation and arrived alongside a broader package of upgrades: an ADA-accessible parking lot, added lighting for nighttime use, restriped parking stalls, and new stop signs and crosswalks around the lagoon itself.
None of that erases anything the way the runway or the marina dredging did. If anything it's the opposite motion, public investment flowing back into the same small patch of ground that's absorbed every other change the neighborhood has weathered. The lagoon, the ducks, the Little League fields built in the early 1960s when the park first expanded south of the water, all of it is still there, just with better lighting now.
The Actual Takeaway
If you already live in Playa del Rey, you've probably heard pieces of this story secondhand. Someone mentioned the Gillis used to be somewhere else. Someone else told you The Shack has been there forever. The Gillis tournament, The Shack's cook-offs and Del Rey Lagoon Park's courts reflect different parts of the neighborhood's beach culture and history. Together, they show how local traditions and public spaces continue to shape life along this stretch of coast.
That's the version of Playa del Rey worth knowing if you're already here. It's not a beach town because the beach cooperates. It's a beach town because the people who live here decided a long time ago that it was going to be one regardless.
If you're thinking about what a neighborhood like this means for your own plans on the Westside, whether you're settled in Playa del Rey already or weighing a move nearby, Danny Mishevski can walk you through what local ownership actually looks like here. Let's Connect.
