After the all-new Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour got underway with the first Challenge stop two weeks ago and the first Elite 16 event last week, it is time for the inaugural Futures tournament to be held this week. Coolangatta Beach on Australia’s eastern coast is ready to welcome the historic Beach Pro Tour event from March 30 through April 3. With the main draw starting on Thursday, all centre court action will be streamed live on the Beach Volleyball World YouTube channel.

Teams from 10 different countries will compete in Coolangatta. The double-gender event will start with Wednesday’s single-elimination qualifiers, which will determine which four men’s and four women’s duos join the 12 pairs per gender seeded directly into the main draw.

In each gender, a 16-team main draw will feature a modified pool play system with the top three duos in each four-team pool advancing to the knockout stage. The pool winners will progress directly to the quarterfinals, while the pool runners-up and the third-placed pairs will play in the Round of 12. Main draw action starts on Thursday and will last through Sunday, when the semifinals and the medal matches will be played.

Three European pairs lead the men’s preliminary seeding on entry points. Top seeds Maximilian Trummer and Felix Friedl of Austria will be looking for their first international podium as a team as they make their Beach Pro Tour debut. Poland’s Jakub Zdybek and Pawel Lewandowski, gold medallists at September’s FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour Apeldoorn 1-star, have already tested the sand on the new Tour at the Tlaxcala Challenge in Mexico. So have 21-year-old English twins Joaquin Bello and Javier Bello, winners of the 2021 Cortegaca 1-star in August. Now both teams will go straight into the main draw as the number two and number three seeds, respectively.

Fifth-seeded New Zealanders Sam O'Dea and Bradley Fuller and eighth-seeded Aussies Izac Carracher and Mark Nicolaidis have already tried the courts at Coolangatta Beach. Last Sunday, they met in the Australian Championship final with the Kiwis snatching a tie-breaker victory.

Phoebe Bell and 2016 Olympian Nicole Laird, who also played in the Tlaxcala qualifiers, and then won the national title in Coolangatta last weekend, are second on entry points in the women’s preliminary seeding. 2021 Cortegaca 1-star champions Alice Zeimann and Shaunna Polley of New Zealand are the highest ranked women’s duo in this week’s Futures main draw, while the top three is completed by Japan’s Asami Shiba and Takemi Nishibori, who made their international debut as a team in the Itapema 4-star main draw in November and, two weeks ago, lost in three sets to Laird and Bell in the Tlaxcala qualifiers.

In addition to the host nation, Austria, England, Japan, New Zealand and Poland, four more countries – Canada, Israel, Switzerland and USA – will be represented by their teams on the Australian sand this week.

Coolangatta men’s teams

Coolangatta women’s teams

Coolangatta match schedule

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