Beach is in town! A key highlight of the 2022 season, featuring the top teams in the world, the Beach Volleyball World Championships Rome 2022 will begin on Friday with 36 matches to be played on the first competition day.
Beach Volleyball World Champs 2022
Rome 2022 to get underway with 36 matches on Friday
Watch the World Championships live on Volleyball.tv
Published 12:00, 09 Jun 2022
Brazil's Duda will be one of the players to look out for on day one of the World Championships
Three courts at the Foro Italico will welcome the participants at the 13th edition of the World Championships from June 10 through 19 for a total of 216 matches, starting at nine local time on Friday morning (07:00 GMT). Three games are scheduled to start every hour from 9 AM to 8 PM, after which action will continue with three more matches on centre court only.
· Watch all matches at the Rome 2022 World Championships live on Volleyball.tv.
Two Moroccan teams will have the honours of playing the opening matches in both genders. Imane Zeroual and Mahassine Siad will get the women’s pool stage underway with a court 2 game against third-seeded Latvians Anastasija Kravcenoka and Tina Graudina. At the same time, their compatriots Mohamed Abicha and Soufiane El Gharouti will take on the third-seeded team in the men’s bracket, Alexander Brouwer and Robert Meeuwsen of the Netherlands, on court 3.
Centre court action will also get underway at nine o’clock with a women’s fixture between Japan’s Miki Ishii/Sayaka Mizoe and Tokyo 2020 Olympic bronze medallists Joana Heidrich/Anouk Verge-Depre of Switzerland.
The first leg of matches in all 12 women’s pools, or a total of 24 games, will be completed on day one. In some of Friday’s most interesting women’s duels, USA’s Terese Cannon/Sarah Sponcil will play against Cuban Olympians Leila Martinez/Lidy Echeverria at 10:00, and Argentina’s Ana Gallay/Fernanda Pereyra and Chile’s Maria Rivas Zapata/Chris Vorpahl will engage in a neighbourly South American clash at 11:00.
Another intriguing battle, but between two European teams, Barbora Hermannova/Martina Williams of Czechia and Katharina Schutzenhofer/Lena Plesiutschnig of Austria, will start at 14:00 on court 2, while four Tokyo Olympians, Brazil’s Eduarda Santos Lisboa (Duda) and Ana Patricia Ramos and China’s Fan Wang and Xinyi Xia lock horns in the other Pool B game on centre court.
There will be plenty of tough-to-call encounters later in the day too, like the one between Canada’s Sophie Bukovec/Brandie Wilkerson and Switzerland’s Esmee Bobner /Zoe Verge-Depre at 15:00, or another between Germany’s Karla Borger/Julia Sude and Poland’s Kinga Wojtasik/Katarzyna Kociolek at 17:00.
Six of the men’s pools (A through F) will also get started on Friday with their first-leg fixtures. Some of the 12 games to look out for are between USA’s Chaim Schalk/Theodore Brunner and Norway’s Mathias Berntsen/Hendrik Mol at 14:00, a South American encounter between Bruno Schmidt/Saymon Barbosa of Brazil (seeded 24th) and Nicolas Capogrosso/Tomas Capogrosso of Argentina (seeded 25th) at 17:00, and the last men’s match of the day, between Italy’s Daniele Lupo/Alex Ranghieri and Canada’s Samuel Schachter/Daniel Dearing at 20:00 on centre court.
