Luxembourg, Luxembourg, September 22, 2014. With the completion of the three tournaments in Denmark, Scotland and Malta this past weekend, the second round of the 2014-2016 CEV Beach Volleyball Continental Cup for both women and men is now in the history having filled in all the blanks in the line-up for the third round to be held in 2015 across Europe.
A total of 18 national teams per gender took part in the four second round tournaments held on four different islands across the continent. The first one was held on August 31 and September 1, 2014, on the island of Ada Ciganlija in Belgrade, Serbia. The remaining three tournaments took place on September 20 and 21 at three different venues – Odense on the Danish island of Funen, Scotland’s capital Edinburgh on the island of Great Britain and Mellieha on the island of Malta, which served as the arenas for exciting beach volleyball action in Pools A, B and C respectively.
Two teams per gender from each pool qualified to the third round. On the men’s side, the eight national federations to progress are Azerbaijan, Israel, Scotland and Slovenia as pool winners and Croatia, Lithuania, Romania and Slovakia as pool runners-up. In 2015, they will join the men’s beach volleyball national teams of the Netherlands, Poland, Italy, Germany, Latvia, Spain, Austria and Russia, which, based on the CEV Country Ranking, will start their campaigns directly from the third round, and those of Belarus, Belgium, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, England, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Norway, Portugal, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey and Ukraine, which qualified directly from the first round.
Similarly, on the women’s side, Azerbaijan, England, Slovenia and Turkey advanced as pool winners and Denmark, Latvia, Scotland and Serbia booked their third round spots as pool runners-up to complete the list of 32. Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Italy, Russia, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Spain are the ones that will start their participation from the third round and Belarus, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Finland, France, Greece, Israel, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Sweden and Ukraine are the sixteen successful squads in the second round.
Round 3 will take place in 2015 with the participation of 32 countries per gender with 8 of them qualifying directly to the semifinals in 2016 and 16 moving on to Round 4 which will also be held in 2015 and will determine the other eight semifinalists in each gender.
The final round will take place in 2016 with eight women’s and eight men’s national teams vying for continental honors. The eventual winners of the CEV Beach Volleyball Continental Cup will earn quotas for the beach volleyball tournament of the 2016 Olympic Games, while another two countries will have a second opportunity to qualify for Rio via the intercontinental final round that will also be held in 2016.
Click here for more detailed information on the competition.