25-year-old Claudia Scampoli and 24-year-old Giada Bianchi will try to build upon their best achievement so far as a team last week, as they hit the Tlaxcala sand this week. The two Italian athletes teamed up about a year ago. In 2025, they managed to get a fourth-place finish at the Alanya Challenge in Turkiye. Last week in Joao Pessoa, Brazil, they repeated that success, but at the highest Elite level, which also led to their highest ever position in the FIVB Beach Volleyball World Ranking, 16th place.
Sara Hughes & Allysa Batenhorst of the United States are another team to watch in the Tlaxcala women’s tournament. 2023 world champion and Paris 2024 Olympian Hughes returns to the venue where she won her world title under three years ago. Her new team with promising indoor-to-beach convert Batenhorst has already claimed its first Beach Pro Tour medal – bronze at the first Challenge event of the year in Bhubaneswar, India some 10 days ago.
The fans in Mexico will get to enjoy the stellar presence of two-time Olympian Xia Xinyi, who will represent China in the Tlaxcala main draw along with her current partner Yan Xu. Other Olympians like Lithuania’s Monika Paulikiene & Aine Raupelyte and Paraguay’s Giuliana Poletti Corrales & Michelle Valiente are also set to grace the main draw courts of this week’s Challenge event.
Beyond the directly seeded 24 teams, the Tlaxcala main draw will also feature some teams that have already medaled on the Beach Pro Tour this year at the Futures level, like last week’s participants in the all-Chinese final of the Haikou Futures – Jiang Kaiyue & Dong Jie and Kadeliye Halaiti & Zhou Mingli – and Romania’s Beata Vaida & Francesca Alupei, who picked up gold at the Mount Maunganui Futures and silver at the Coolangatta Futures. All three of these pairs have already secured their advancement from Wednesday’s qualifiers with byes.
The Tlaxcala 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, with eight pools of four teams each, playing two pool semifinals, a losers’ match and a winners’ match to determine the final 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 standings.
Women’s action in Tlaxcala is about to get underway with Wednesday’s qualification tournament, serving off at 11:00 local time (19:00 UTC).
