Manhattan Beach August Events: Your Guide to the Pier

For seventeen days in August, the block west of Ocean Drive stops being a street and starts being a venue. If you live here, that fact governs everything from your grocery run to where you can park your contractor's truck. It is also the reason August is the most concentrated stretch of civic programming on the Manhattan Beach calendar, and knowing the rhythm is the difference between enjoying it and driving around it.

The pattern this year is bookended: the Charlie Saikley 6-Man on the first weekend, the AVP Manhattan Beach Open on the middle weekend, and Concerts in the Park at Polliwog every Sunday in between. Read together, they tell you something about the town that a single event never could. This is not a beach community that hosts events. It is a beach community organized around them.

The Closure Calendar, In One Place

The dates for the AVP main draw are the one detail worth double-checking before you commit a dinner reservation. The City of Manhattan Beach volleyball page lists competition Aug 13–16 with a Walk of Fame ceremony on the 13th. AVP's own event page lists Aug 15–17. Local coverage from MB News and city calendar entries has floated Aug 14–16. Assume the pier is functionally unusable from Aug 13 through Aug 16 and plan the surrounding days generously.

Weekend One: Saikley Is A Local Event That Went National

The Charlie Saikley 6-Man dates to 1974 and remains the tournament that established the costume-and-carnival side of beach volleyball culture. The Saikley family runs it in partnership with Manhattan Beach Parks and Recreation, and the format keeps its original character: amateur teams, six per side, on the south side of the Pier. The Jr. 6-Man follows on Sunday, Aug 2, and 2026 marks its eleventh year, a deliberate continuation of the youth thread the tournament was built on.

If you have not attended in a few years, the two shifts worth knowing are these. First, the family-friendly framing is back in the marketing after several years when the event leaned heavier on the party. Second, the closure of Manhattan Beach Boulevard from Ocean Drive to the Pier begins early Thursday morning, Jul 30, which means the last two workdays of July are already a delivery and construction bottleneck for the Sand Section. If you have a mover, an inspector, or a landscape crew scheduled the last week of July, the practical deadline for a west-of-Highland job site is Wednesday.

Weekend Two: The AVP Turns The Pier Into A Stadium

The Manhattan Beach Open by AVP is the oldest professional beach volleyball tournament in the world, dating to 1960, and it sits at the top of the AVP Gold Series. The format is a dual-gender, 32-team main draw played as a double-elimination tournament, sets to 21, best two of three. General admission is free with first-come seating. The economic footprint is what matters if you live here: MBB west of Ocean Drive closes for the entire ten-day run from Aug 10 through Aug 19, not just the competition weekend, to accommodate court construction and teardown.

That closure has downstream effects that catch new residents off guard. Downtown restaurants shift to walk-in traffic because reservations get canceled by out-of-town guests who cannot find parking. Bike parking around town becomes the fastest way in. The city itself advises walking, biking, or rideshare over any attempt to drive to the pier during those dates. If you are hosting friends who want to watch, the honest advice is to park east of Sepulveda and walk down the greenbelt, or bike from anywhere in the Sand Section.

One local dimension the national broadcast will not capture: the AVP is one of the few professional tour stops where amateurs still qualify into the main draw through a two-day qualifier capped at 77 teams. That is why a South Bay kid who spent middle school on the Marine Avenue courts can, in theory, end up playing an Olympian on Sunday. The Walk of Fame ceremony on the pier at 3:30 PM on Aug 13 is the setting where that lineage gets made explicit.

The Sundays In Between

Concerts in the Park is a 49-year-old series at the Polliwog Park amphitheater, presented by Manhattan Beach Parks and Recreation and sponsored by Chevron. The 2026 season runs every Sunday from July 5 through September 6, from 5 to 7 PM. Admission is free, seating is first-come, and picnic-style dining is the entire point. Alcohol is permitted per event listings, though tents and anything that blocks sightlines are not.

The five August dates and their acts:

• Aug 2 — Jimmy's Buffet, a Jimmy Buffett tribute, first-time at the series
• Aug 9 — Cobra Cowboy, first-time at the series
• Aug 16 — Gypsy Dreams, first-time at the series
• Aug 23 — The Police Academy, a Police tribute, first-time at the series
• Aug 30 — Stone Soul, first-time at the series

The season closes September 6 with ABBA LA, if you want to plan the arc. What is quietly notable about the 2026 lineup is that six of the ten acts are first-time appearances. That is a heavier rotation than usual and worth paying attention to if you have written the series off as the same handful of tribute bands you saw in 2019.

Two practical notes that separate first-timers from regulars at Polliwog. Low-back chairs only, or you will earn a polite but firm request from a neighbor. Pets, barbecues, skateboards, and scooters are not permitted in the concert area at any time. Parking is on-site and on the surrounding streets, and the Aug 16 concert overlaps the final day of the AVP, so plan for the whole east-of-Sepulveda parking pool to be tighter than usual on that Sunday.

What The Overlap Actually Means For A Resident

The single most useful mental model for August: the town has two centers of gravity, and they trade off on a predictable schedule. The Pier is the center from Jul 30 through Aug 3 and again from Aug 10 through Aug 19. Polliwog is the center every Sunday, 5 to 7 PM. The middle of the day on non-Sunday weekdays outside the AVP window is the only stretch where the town operates on a normal footing.

That has real consequences worth planning around.

If you are listing a home in the Sand Section in August, your open house should not overlap the AVP weekend. Buyers who cannot park will not walk six blocks in ninety-degree sun to see a house they have not committed to. Open houses the weekend of Aug 8–9 or Aug 22–23 will draw better foot traffic than the same house shown Aug 15–16.

If you are having work done on a west-of-Highland property, the two clean windows in the month are Aug 4–7 and Aug 20–29. Everything else is either a closure or a spillover day.

If you are hosting out-of-town guests and you want them to see the town at its most itself, the answer is not the AVP finals. It is the Sunday of the Saikley on the Pier, followed by dinner in a neighborhood that has not yet been overtaken by tournament crowds, and a Concert at Polliwog the next weekend for contrast. That sequence tells the story of what this town is more honestly than any single event on the calendar.

The Boring Logistics That Save The Month

Three details worth writing down. The Parks and Recreation Department can be reached at (310) 802-5448 for anything unclear about a closure or a permit. Handicap parking for Concerts in the Park is at the Begg Pool lot, with a rideshare drop at Manhattan Beach Boulevard. And the official street closure maps for both tournaments are downloadable from the City of Manhattan Beach special events page, which is the source to trust when the dates on the various listings disagree.

August is the month Manhattan Beach reminds you why you moved here and simultaneously tests whether you know how to live here. The residents who enjoy it most are the ones who read the closure map first and the concert lineup second.

If you are thinking about a summer sale, a summer purchase, or simply want a read on how event calendars like this one affect timing and buyer traffic in the Sand Section and the Tree Section, Gauss Real Estate Group works these blocks every week and would be glad to talk through the details specific to your address. Let's start the conversation today.