Credit: volleyball.org.au
The international beach volleyball season kicked off in Mollymook on the NSW south coast Wednesday with the opening day of the Beach Pro Tour Futures event.
With four men’s and four women’s main draw positions up for grabs, Wednesday’s qualifying brought an all or nothing attitude from all teams and the home teams responded well.
Three Australian men’s teams have made it through, meaning they will take seven of the 16 places in the men’s draw.
Patrick Tang and Jack Gregory made it to the bronze medal match at the opening event of this season’s national tour but the results haven’t followed and they were ranked 13th going into qualifying. However they put that form aside to take down the fourth and fifth seeds to advance to what will be just the second Futures main draw for each player.
Other Australian teams to make it through qualifying were Rob Reeves and Declan Tiso whose only other Futures main draw appearance came last year in Montpellier, along with Ky Landers and Matt Abela who are playing their first-ever Futures tournament together.
American duo Benjamin Vaught and Kevin Coyle were the fourth team to make it into the main draw, coming from a set down to defeat Australians Garang Anyang and Justin Schumann.
The story wasn’t as bright for Australia’s women’s teams. Six pairs were whittled down to three in the preliminary phase, before the remaining three were eliminated by American and Japanese opponents in the second round.
Wednesday’s results saw seven men’s and four Australian women’s teams in the main draw which starts Thursday, along with pairs from Thailand, England, Japan, Germany, Israel, Canada, Vanuatu and the USA.
Thursday’s action starts with the first men’s pool matches from 10am AEDT while the women’s main draw gets underway at 2pm AEDT.
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