Mark Bucknam, and the making of AVP Uncovered

HERMOSA BEACH, Calif. — The idea for AVP Uncovered, a five-part docuseries being released on Thursday evening on YouTube, is not a new one. It is, in fact, one of the most tired and exhausted ideas in the sport of beach volleyball: Somebody — anybody — should document the lives of these players.

All of them, from the up and comers to the established pros.

The issue wasn’t the idea. It’s fantastic, truly, as beach volleyball offers one of the most unique lifestyles of any professional sport. Few athletic endeavors, for example, offer the potential of chasing an Olympic gold medal while also hustling as a bartender at the Century Club. The dichotomy, and the lifestyle that comes with it, brings immense intrigue: How in the world do these players do it? And why?

The problem lay in the execution. There is, to borrow a phrase Mark Bucknam has come to espouse, a lot of dreamers, folks who knew the idea was every bit as sound as the rocket ship that became F1: Drive to Survive. But the execution? The physical taking of the risk? The actual doing of said dream? That was absent.

“There’s a quote: ‘The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers, but what the world needs most are dreamers that do.’ It’s one of my favorite quotes ever,” Bucknam said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “I was sitting there one day thinking I’d love to make this thing happen, and I’m one of the few people in the world that loves beach volleyball and video production. There’s not many that could step in and do something. I pitched it to my buddies and they were all about it.”

Alas, then, the dream — to document the lives of beach volleyball players, both on and off the court — had a trio of doers in Bucknam, Howard Yang, and Bruce Bendheim, a group who had been best friends since elementary school and founded a fledgling video production company, BYB Pictures, after college. But the details — the how, the who, the when — remained, at best, murky.

When it was founded, BYB was every bit the ragtag operation you’d expect from a group of 20-somethings. They lived and operated out of Yang’s basement. Cold-called recently engaged couples who were in search of wedding photographers and asked if they’d like a video instead. Filmed and produced six episodes of something called Eat Play Stay: Boston, which is now on Apple TV and…