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 a stretch of sand that isn't a volleyball court anymore. It's a runway apron.
That's the part of Playa del Rey's beach culture that doesn't make it into the generic guides. The waves left first, then the beach itself got taken twice more, and the tournament that grew out of all that loss just kept setting up nets wherever the sand held.
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.
That's the setup nobody explains before jumping to "PDR has a great beach vibe." The vibe survived. The specific thing that created it did not.
A Tournament Starts on a Beach That No Longer Exists
Six years after the breakwater killed 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, the beach itself disappeared. LAX expanded its west runway in 1974 and wiped out the small shoreline community around Gillis Street entirely. Homes gone, streets gone, the neighborhood that gave the tournament its name erased by airport infrastructure.
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 second 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 county forced a third relocation, pushing the event south to Dockweiler Beach, where it's played ever 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 erases the surrounding neighborhood | Gillis Beach, tournament continues |
| 1980 | City dredges marina sand onto the beach, burying 10 courts | Moves to Toes Beach |
| 2005 | County forces another relocation | Moves to Dockweiler Beach |
Three forced moves in thirty four years, and at no point did anyone decide to just let it end.
It Got Bigger Every Time It Got Kicked Out
The counterintuitive part is what happened to attendance. A tournament that lost its home site three times should have shrunk, or folded, or drifted into a smaller, sadder version of itself. 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 a beach that got paved over twice, kept alive by nothing but people showing up.
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 took 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, matches the neighborhood's broader pattern. What gets taken away by runway expansions and marina dredging gets replaced by something that just keeps showing up in the same spot, year after year.
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. What connects those fragments is a neighborhood that keeps losing the physical thing that anchors its identity and keeps rebuilding the identity anyway, on whatever ground is left. The surf broke first. The beach itself got taken twice more. The volleyball tournament and the chili cook off and the resurfaced basketball courts are what a community does instead of giving up on a stretch of coastline that has never once made things easy for it.
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.
