Sam Schachter and Sergiy Popov return to Alanya where they first triumphed as world champions

Alanya is about to welcome the Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour for the second straight year. The southern Turkish Mediterranean resort city will host another Challenge event this week, after the successful organization of the first one last year. For two of the veteran players in the men’s field – Canada’s Samuel Schachter and Ukraine’s Sergiy Popov – it will be a trip down memory lane, as Alanya is the place where they first triumphed as age-category world champions many years ago. The sixth Challenge stop on the 2026 calendar is set to take place from Wednesday to Sunday, June 10 to 14.

• Watch the Alanya Challenge on the Beach Volleyball World YouTube channel

36-year-old two-time Olympian Sam Schachter is back to Alanya some 16 years after he conquered the title at the 2010 FIVB U21 Beach Volleyball World Championship along with Garrett May, when they made an impressive run of seven victories in a row on the way to the world crown. This week, Schachter will compete alongside his current partner – 24-year-old Jonathan Pickett. They joined forces after the Paris 2024 Olympic Games and currently reign as the 2025 NORCECA continental champions, but they are still chasing their first podium together on the Beach Pro Tour.

Some 17 years ago, 34-year-old Ukrainian Sergiy Popov triumphed as a U19 world champion at the 2009 youth event in Alanya. He and Valeriy Samoday also won all seven of their matches at the Mediterranean coast on the way to the U19 World Championship gold. Two years later, they rejoiced as world champions again, this time in the U21 category, at the junior event in Halifax, Canada. Popov returns to Alanya with another veteran player – 36-year-old Eduard Reznik – as a partner. In 2022, the Ukrainian pair collected three silver medals on the Beach Pro Tour, but they have not made any Tour podiums ever since. The upcoming Alanya Challenge will be their first tournament on the Beach Pro Tour for 2026.

The men’s pre-seeding on entry points is topped by the Italian pairing of Paris 2024 Olympian Samuele Cottafava and Gianluca Dal Corso, who celebrated gold at the Nayarit Challenge in March. Right below them on the list is the Argentinean team of Tokyo 2020 Olympian Nicolas Capogrosso and his younger brother Tomas Capogrosso. Together, they have collected four Beach Pro Tour medals, all of them silver, with the most recent podium at the Tlaxcala Challenge in March of this year. The top three is completed by Schachter & Pickett.

Four-time Olympian, 2017 World Championship silver medalist and two-time European Championship medalist Alexander Horst of Austria, four-time Olympian, 2013 European champion and two-time European Championship bronze medalist Adrian Gavira of Spain, two-time Olympian and 2015 European Championship silver medalist Alex Ranghieri of Italy, and two-time Olympian and 2021 European Championship bronze medalist Piotr Kantor of Poland will also be adding to the glitter with their stellar presence in Antalya, along with their current partners – Paul Pascariuc, Alejandro Huerta, Manuel Alfieri and Filip Lejawa, respectively.

The list of Olympians to take part in the Alanya Challenge main draw continues with USA’s Miles Evans and Switzerland’s Adrian Heidrich, while Australian Olympian Thomas Hodges and Austrian Olympian Julian Horl are set to get their Alanya campaign started from Wednesday’s qualifiers.

The Alanya Challenge tournament will be conducted with a 32-team main draw in each gender. It starts on Wednesday with the qualification rounds with eight teams progressing to the main draw and joining the 24 directly seeded. The main draw begins on Thursday with modified pool play, featuring eight pools of four teams each, playing two pool semifinals, a losers’ match and a winners’ match to determine the final pool standings. The teams that finish third in the pools will take on the runners-up of other pools in the sixteenthfinal single-elimination round, the winners of which will move to the eighthfinal round, where they will challenge the eight pool winners. Quarterfinals, semifinals and medal matches will follow to determine the final tournament standings.

Men’s action in Alanya is set to get underway with Wednesday’s qualification tournament, serving off at 12:30 local time (09:30 UTC).

Alanya Challenge: men’s entry list
Alanya Challenge: match schedule

Quick links:
Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour
VBTV
Beach Volleyball World Facebook
Beach Volleyball World X
Beach Volleyball World Instagram
Beach Volleyball World YouTube
Subscribe to Volleyball World's Newsletter