FIVB Announces Pools for Beach World Championships

B.J. Hoeptner Evans
Manager, Media Relations and Publications
Phone: (719) 228-6800
E-Mail: bj.evans@usav.org

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (May 31, 2011) – As expected, the U.S. beach volleyball team of Phil Dalhausser and Todd Rogers will be the No. 1 seed in the men’s bracket at the 2011 FIVB Beach Volleyball Swatch World Championships to be held June 13-19 in Rome, Italy.

Defending women’s champions Jen Kessy (San Juan Capistrano, Calif.) and April Ross (Costa Mesa, Calif.) will be the third seeds in the women’s bracket while two-time defending Olympic champions Misty May-Treanor (Santa Monica, Calif.) and Kerri Walsh (San Jose, Calif.) will be ranked fifth.

All the U.S. teams, both men’s and women’s, are the top-seeded team in their pools.

The FIVB announced the composition of the 12 main draw pools for the 2011 FIVB Beach Volleyball Swatch World Championships at an official press conference on Tuesday at the Foro Italico, a sports complex in Rome.

Present at the ground breaking press conference were FIVB Beach Volleyball Commission president Dr. Ary Graça, CONI president Giovanni Petrucci, Italy Volleyball Federation president Carlo Magri, director general of host broadcaster La7 Marco Ghigliani and smart representative Dominik Greuel.

The top two teams from each World Championship pool plus the eight best third-place finishers will move on to the knockout phase. Pool play matches for each gender will be held on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday (June 13-15) followed by the 32-team elimination rounds on Thursday and Friday (June 16-17). The semifinals will be held on Saturday evening, June 18 with the medal matches set for Sunday evening, June 19.

In the men’s draw, world No. 1, Olympic champions and 2007 world champions Rogers (Santa Barbara, Calif.) and Phil Dalhausser (Ormond Beach, Fla.) will be joined in Pool A by compatriots Casey Jennings (Las Vegas, Nev.) and Kevin Wong (Honolulu, Hawaii), who are ranked 24th, the Ces brothers – Andy and Kevin of France (25) – and Angola’s Morais Abreu and Mario Silva (48).

The U.S. men’s team of Matt Fuerbringer (Costa Mesa, Calif.) and Nick Lucena (Santa Barbara, Calif.) is seeded seventh and will share Pool G with Brazil’s Harley Marques and Thiago Santos Barbosa, Georgia’s Renato "Geor" Gomes and Jorge "Gia" Terceiro along with Australia’s Sam Boehm and Isaac Kapa.

The U.S. men’s team of Jake Gibb (Bountiful, Utah) and Sean Rosenthal (Redondo Beach, Calif.) is seeded 10th and will be in Pool K with Latvia’s Martins Plavins and Janis Smedins, Estonia’s Karl Jaani and Rivo Vesik along with Russia’s Serguei Prokopiev and Konstantin Semenov.

Defending champions Julius Brink and Jonas Reckermann are seeded fourth in Pool D.

Kessy and Ross top Pool C, which also includes the Czech Republic’s Hana Klapalova and Lenka Hajeckova (22), Barbera Hansel and Sara Montagnolli of Austria (27) and Switzerland’s Muriel Graessli and Tanja Goricanec (46).

May-Treanor and Walsh are joined in Pool E by two teams from the Czech Republic - Kristyna Kolocova and Slukova Marketa (20), and Sona Novakova Dosoudilova and Tereza Tobiasova – as well as Italy’s Laura Giombini and Valeria Rosso (29).

In Pool L, Angie Akers (Fort Wayne, Ind.) and Nicole Branagh (Orinda, Calif.) will be the top seeds and the 11th-ranked team overall. They will play Italy’s Gioria Daniela and Giulia Momoli, Latvia’s Inguna Minusa and Inese Jursone and also Belgium’s Katrien Gielen and Liesbeth Mouha.

Lauren Fendrick (Carlsbad, Calif.) and Brooke Hanson (Woodland Hills, Calif.), ranked 12th, will lead Pool M and will face Italy’s Greta Cicolari and Marta Menegatti, Great Britain’s Denise Johns and Lucy Boulton along with Netherlands’ Roos Van der Hoeven and Jantine van der Vlist.

Women’s world No. 1 Juliana Felisberta Silva and Larissa Franca from Brazil are in Pool A.

The World Championships are a key Olympic qualification event and is the seventh leg of the FIVB Swatch World Tour, a circuit that lasts eight months that will make a stop in 16 different countries on four continents.

Each edition of the tournament includes a total of 45 teams as well as three wildcards – for men: Pedro Cunha and Pedro Salgado Pedro (Brazil), Christian Redmann and Ben Saxton (Canada) and Alex Ranghieri and Daniele Lupo (Italy). For women: Geeske Banck and Anja Günther (Germany), Natalie Cook and Tara West (Australia) and Viktoria Orsi Toth and Giada Benazzi (Italy).

The competition schedule of the Pools phase will be disclosed by the FIVB and FIPAV on June 10 when the semifinalists of the preceding Grand Slam in Beijing will be announced.

The global event’s program will be also featuring a large entertainment program and side events.

Spectators can attend the 2011 FIVB Beach Volleyball Swatch World Championships free of charge from Monday to Sunday with a €5 fee charged on Saturday and Sunday for special seats placed on the first ring of the stadium.

Celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2011 presenting international Beach Volleyball events, the Fédération Internationale de Volleyball, based in Lausanne, Switzerland returns for the third consecutive season to Rome and the FIVB Swatch World Tour has had at least one event in Italy since 1989 except for 1993, 1994 and 2002. The FIVB Swatch World Championships at the Parco del Foro Italico will mark the 17th time a men’s event has been held in Italy and the 10th time for the women. Built on the grounds of the Stadio Olympico from the 1960 Rome Olympics, the magnificent Parco del Foro Italico is a major international tennis and sports complex being converted for use as a beach volleyball complex for the FIVB Swatch World Championships. The venue, artistically designed and completed in stages between 1928 and 1938, will have five competition courts and two warm-up courts with the featured centre court being in the 10,000-seat main tennis stadium at the Foro Italico.

The previous FIVB Swatch World Championships in its current format were held in Los Angeles (1997), Marseille, France (1999), Klagenfurt, Austria (2001), Rio de Janeiro (2003), Berlin (2005), Gstaad, Switzerland (2007) and Stavanger, Norway (2009). The first FIVB World Championships were held in Brazil in 1987, prior to the start of the current format that began in 1997. The next edition will be held in Poland in 2013.

Tags: Angie Akers, April Ross, Beach, Beach Volleyball, Brooke Hanson, Casey Jennings, FIVB World Championship, Jake Gibb, Jennifer Kessy, Kerri Walsh, Kevin Wong, Lauren Fendrick, Matt Fuerbringer, Misty May, Misty May-Treanor, Nick Lucena, Nicole Branagh, Phil Dalhausser, Sean Rosenthal, Todd Rogers, World Championships