By Darryl Slater

Avery Willis and Natalie Stallings have spent the past three weeks trying to learn a sport called footvolley, a soccer-volleyball hybrid and the newest event at this weekend's North American Sand Soccer Championships in Virginia Beach.

They studied Internet video clips of Brazilians playing the sport and exhausted themselves practicing at Virginia Beach's Ninth Street volleyball courts.

One problem: They'll be playing some of the world's best women in the new event, and they still don't know how it's scored.

"If you figure out anything," Stallings said, "let me know."

OK, here goes: Footvolley is actually more volley than foot.

Games are scored like volleyball. First team to 15 points wins. First to win two games wins the match.

Players - teams have two - can use any body part except their hands to volley the ball. Most skilled players use their heads and chests. Three touches are allowed per side.

"You need to know how to control the ball very well," said Paulo Ferreira, a Brazilian who coaches the successful Flamilia beach soccer team and occasionally plays footvolley. "You use your chest to set up the ball and head to finish the whole thing."

Dick Whalen, director of the 11th annual sand soccer event, decided to debut footvolley to shake up the weekend. Footvolley play begins tonight at 7. The championship match is at 4 p.m. Sunday.

Sand soccer play kicks off today at noon. All told, Whalen expects about 6,500 players to turn out on 14 blocks of sand fields at the Oceanfront. The pro division returns with 12 U.S. and international teams vying for $15,000 in prize money. The defending champs, HRSC All-Stars, are back and are likely to be challenged by squads of Brazilian players and a strong entry from Milan, Italy.

Willis and Stallings make up 1 of 2 American teams. Lindsay Vanderspiegel and Erica Cooper are scheduled to play on the other, but Vanderspiegel may withdraw because of a bruised bone in her right foot.

Four other teams, two from Canada and two from Brazil, will compete. On the men's side, three American teams will take on players from Brazil, Canada and Ecuador.

First-place men's and women's teams win $1,000, with $500 for second and $250 for third.

The money helped attract the American women's attention. Kevin Denson, a William and Mary women's assistant coach, called Willis, Stallings, Vanderspiegel and Cooper to recruit them for footvolley. Willis, Vanderspiegel and Cooper played at William and Mary.

"If he said we could've won $10, I would've been pumped," Stallings said.

Denson said some soccer teams warm up before practice with activities like footvolley - most call it soccer volleyball - and soccer tennis.

"I always thought to play it," Willis said. "But I never thought of it as an original sport."

Brazilians invented the sport in 1963. The court is 60 feet long and 16 feet wide. The net is 7 feet, 4 inches high - the same as for women's beach volleyball.

"This is a lot more skillful type of activity," Denson said.

Said Willis: "It's way more technically oriented than sand soccer, where you just kind of beast it out."