The pair of namesakes is set to make its Beach Pro Tour debut as a team. 30-year-old Molly Shaw is the more experienced of the two. Last year, she played alongside Kelly Cheng, the reigning world champion at the time. The two reached the quarterfinals of the Adelaide 2025 FIVB Beach Volleyball World Championship and triumphed at the Joao Pessoa Elite for one of Shaw’s eight Beach Pro Tour medals she has earned so far with various partners. So far in 2026, she has appeared at only one Beach Pro Tour stop, the Gstaad Elite earlier this month, temporarily reunited with Toni Rodriguez, but they stopped short of making it past the pool stage.
It is the third Beach Pro Tour season for 26-year-old Molly Phillips. After reaching several quarterfinals, she is yet to earn her first Tour medal. Last year, she toured mostly with Hailey Harward, while so far this year, she had been competing alongside Abby Van Winkle.
Tokyo 2020 silver medalist Taliqua Clancy highlights the strong presence of Olympians in the women’s line-up for Shangluo. The three-time Olympian will take to the Chinese sand along with recently partnered Stefanie Fejes. Clancy is still looking for her first Beach Pro Tour podium since 2023.
Two-time Olympian Xia Xinyi and her 21-year-old teammate Yan Xu will be able to rely on the home crowd support in Shangluo to repeat their success from the Nayarit Challenge, where they topped the podium earlier this year.
France’s Lezana Placette & Alexia Richard are the only duo on the Shangluo list that played at the Olympics as such. Another four Olympians will grace the courts in China with their current teammates. Spain’s Tania Moreno and Czechia’s Marie-Sara Stochlova will start straight from the main draw, partnering with Marketa Svozilova and Sofia Izuzquiza, respectively.
Izuzquiza returns to Shangluo, the place where she celebrated as a U19 World Championship silver medalist two years ago. Her partner at the time – Marta Carro – will also compete at this week’s Challenge event, along with Adriana Serrano. They will have to fight for their spot in the main draw in Wednesday’s qualifiers.
Another two Olympians – Japan’s Miki Ishii and Spain’s Paula Soria – along with Sakura Ito and Belen Carro are also set to enter the tournament from the qualifiers.
The Shangluo 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.
Women’s qualification action in Shangluo is set to serve off on Wednesday at 12:00 local time (04:00 UTC).
