As the first Challenge event of the new Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour season serves off in Mexico on Wednesday, there will be plenty of high-caliber beach volleyball to satisfy the yearnings of the fans, who have been awaiting the return of the Tour’s high season since December’s Finals in Doha. With so many top stars shining on the Yucatan Challenge men’s entry list, headlined by the likes of reigning world champions Ondrej Perusic & David Schweiner, the fans are up for a real treat right from the start.

• Watch the Yucatan Challenge on VBTV.

The Yucatan Challenge in Puerto Progreso is set to take place from Wednesday, March 19, through Sunday, March 23. It will be the first Challenge event to be conducted under the recently adopted new format, with a 32-team main draw per gender. It starts with two rounds of qualifiers with eight teams advancing to the main draw and joining the 24 directly seeded. The main draw begins with modified pool play, with eight pools of four teams, playing two pool semifinals, a losers’ match and a winners’ match to determine the final standings in each pool. 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.

Two-time Olympians Ondrej Perusic & David Schweiner are back to Mexico, where in 2023 they reached the best achievement of their careers, the FIVB Beach Volleyball World Championship title. For various reasons, the Czech standouts have missed many opportunities to compete on the Beach Pro Tour over the past 12 months and that has caused them a deep drop in the FIVB World Ranking, but now Perusic & Schweiner are ready to make up for it as the new season gets underway, and make their way back up the chart, where they belong.

There will be plenty of other stellar presence in Yucatan this week. The pre-seeding list is headed by Cuban Olympians Noslen Diaz & Jorge Alayo. The number 10 team in the world chose an unusual way to prepare for the challenges in the Mexican heat. They joined the wild-card Cuban team that took part in the Finals of the Russian Snow Volleyball National Championship Tour in Novosibirsk last week.

Three-time Olympians Marco Grimalt & Esteban Grimalt of Chile are pre-seeded second on entry points for the main draw in Mexico. Another pair of Paris 2024 Olympians, USA’s Miles Evans & Chase Budinger, currently number eight in the World Ranking, will also start their Yucatan campaign straight from the main draw.

The Yucatan main draw will also feature a number of Paris Olympians, who will appear in the Mexican sand with new partners. Among them are Italy’s Samuele Cottafava, who will compete alongside Gianluca Dal Corso, Netherlands’ Matthew Immers, who has teamed up with Ruben Penninga, Canada’s Samuel Schachter, who will play with Jonathan Pickett, France’s Remi Bassereau, who has joined forces with Calvin Aye, and their compatriot Arnaud Gauthier-Rat, who has partnered up with 20-year-old Theo Rotar.

Some of these new pairs have already had some post-Paris appearances in international beach volleyball as such. Schachter & Pickett competed together at October’s Joao Pessoa Elite16 and at November’s Nuvali Challenge. Bassereau & Aye also played in Nuvali, as well as at November’s Challenge events in Haikou and Chennai, while Gauthier-Rat and 2021 U19 world champion Rotar took to August’s CEV European Championship in the Netherlands right after the Olympics.

It will also be interesting to see how the new rising stars of Sweden, 20-year-old Jacob Holting Nilsson and 18-year-old Elmer Andersson, start the new season, after finishing the previous one in the best possible way, with gold medals from the last two Challenge tournaments in 2024 – Chennai and Nuvali.

All of these teams will start their Yucatan campaigns from the main draw, but there is also plenty to look forward to in Wednesday’s qualifiers, which will feature some top-caliber stars like four-time Olympian and 2017 World Championship runner-up Alexander Horst of Austria (with Laurenz Leitner as a partner), former world’s number one team member George Wanderley of Brazil (with Saymon Barbosa), Poland’s Piotr Kantor, Italy’s Alex Ranghieri, USA’s Trevor Crabb and many others.

Men’s Yucatan Challenge qualifier action is set get underway provisionally on Wednesday at 12:30 local time (18:30 UTC).

VW Beach Pro Tour Yucatan Challenge: men’s entry list

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