Baden, Austria, June 22, 2017. Mathias Berntsen and Christian Sandlie Sørum have gone a long way since years ago they joined Toppvolley Norge, the high-school run by the Norwegian Volleyball Federation where the Scandinavian country’s most promising Volleyball and Beach Volleyball talents develop their skills. They have won a number of medals from European age-group championships and now they are ready to make a name of themselves also at the senior level.
This is what the fans witnessed on Thursday on the second day of the Baden Masters, where Berntsen and Sørum did not drop a single set in the two matches they contested, thus comfortably progressing to the Main Draw. The BeachVolley Vikings – as per the nickname they have chosen for their team – first shut out Slovenia’s Nejc Zemljak/Jan Pokersnik 2-0 (21-14, 21-17) before putting on a show as they took to the court again later in the afternoon routing Switzerland’s Marco Krattiger and Nico Beeler 2-0 as well (21-13, 21-14).
They have gone a long way since the early days when they learned the ABC of Volleyball at the high school where the Norwegian Volleyball Federation have been nurturing their most talented youngsters. The video below shows a young Mathias Berntsen learning how to best control the ball by using his fingers and he recalls: “My technique was so bad at the beginning that my coach wanted me to practice again and again. He recorded videos of these drills, worked on these clips overnight and published them on the Internet. We reviewed them together and he identified where the mistakes where and found ways for me to improve.”
That coach has since returned to his home country, Japan but still follows very closely the steady rise of his former students.
Berntsen, his cousin Anders Berntsen Mol and Sørum are among Europe’s rising Beach Volleyball stars. They work together and as they admit, ‘it feels like we are all brothers, so we easily change the composition of the team and this does not have too much of an impact on our performance’. Berntsen and Mol won silver last Sunday at the #EuroBeachVolleyU22 in Baden and there is more to come from the Vikings now that Mathias and Christian have secured their progression to the Main Draw of the elite Baden Masters.
On the other hand, the newly crowned U22 European champions, Russia’s Artem Yarzutkin and Oleg Stoyanovskiy, surprisingly failed to make it to the Main Draw as they lost in two sets their second match of the day to Germany’s Lorenz Schümann and Julius Thole (19-21, 21-23). The Austrian crowd got something to celebrate as well, since the winners of Wednesday’s Country Quota, Florian Schnetzer and Daniel Müllner, continued their winning run and moved on to the ‘money rounds’ after two straight wins, the second one resulting from a dramatic battle in their late matchup with Aliaksandr Kavalenka and Aliaksandr Dziadkou of Belarus (24-22, 15-21, 15-13). Last but not least, Jonathan Erdmann and Armin Dollinger secured another Main Draw spot for Germany following their closely contested 2-1 victory (24-26, 21-18, 15-13) over Baku 2015 European Games gold medal winners Martins Plavins and Haralds Regza of Latvia.
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