Four Future events added to Beach Pro Tour calendar for 2023

Beach Volleyball elite and especially up-and-coming players will have further opportunities to compete on the international stage throughout 2023 following the addition of another four events on European soil - in Switzerland, Finland, Italy and France - to the 18 Beach Pro Tour Futures events around the world previously announced.

The Swiss town of Spiez in the Bernese Oberland will welcome a double-gender competition from 8-11 June. Even though Spiez has not featured on the global beach volleyball map before, Switzerland has been a real hotspot of the sport for many decades already – with their women’s teams especially achieving remarkable success over the past couple of years. Last year, Switzerland won the women’s competition at the inaugural Beach Volley Nations Cup in Vienna before Nina Brunner and Tanja Hüberli went on to claim silver at EuroBeachVolley in Munich.

The Beach Pro Tour will travel further north in late June for another premiere – this time in Finland’s capital Helsinki. A double-gender competition will run there from 29 June to 2 July at a local beach – Hietaranta – close to Helsinki downtown. Home teams representing Finland as well as those from neighbouring countries will certainly look forward to the opportunity to contest an international tournament in Helsinki. It is the first time such an event takes place on Finnish soil since the Kisakallio Sports Institute in Lohja played host to a women’s-only Satellite in 2016.

Messina in Sicily joins Cervia and Lecce as Italian hosts of this year’s Pro Tour Futures. The event will run on the same dates (29 June-2 July) as the competition in Helsinki – so players will be able to choose whether to travel north or to the Mediterranean Sea to test their skills and vie for valuable ranking points. Last year, a Future event took place in Sicily as well, in yet another iconic location – Giardini Naxos. This time, beach volleyball action will unfold right in the heart of the city of Messina, next to the local historic cathedral.

If Spiez, Helsinki and Messina are all ‘newcomers’ to the Pro Tour, the French city of Montpellier has been a regular feature on the international calendar for many years. A men’s-only tournament will run there from 30 August to 3 September at Place Georges Frêche – and this will certainly help promote the sport even further in France, together with the other Future scheduled to take place earlier in the summer in Lille, less than a year away from the eagerly anticipated Olympic Games Paris 2024.

With the latest additions, the programme of the Beach Pro Tour Futures for 2023 now includes 22 events – so there is much that players, fans, and media alike can look forward to! The FIVB continues to work closely with the National Federations and event organisers to add even more Futures events to the calendar later in the year.