Peter Stewart & Jeff Scott, and Paola Rosas & Sarah Jankowitz are Ireland’s first Kings & Queens of the Court.
With kind support from SportWorx – the global rights holder of this innovative Beach Volleyball format and Fingal County Council, Volleyball Ireland hosted the inaugural King of the Court tournament at Balbriggan Beach. The 45-minute game is played by 5 teams at once, and is broken down into three rounds of 15. You lose a point and you’re off court. The team will the least points at 15 & 30 minute intervals are eliminated leaving three teams in a race to 15 to be crowned Champions.
And on Saturday it was the Northern Irish pair of Stewart & Scott who narrowly edged tour leaders Georg Antal & Evgenni Menschikov into second with Ivo Teixeira & Jonathan Workman taking third. In fact, Teixeira and new partner Workman who flew out of the blocks in the opening round to open up a tidy lead. But with each teams scores being re-set to zero at the start of each round their early strong play was in vain.
Marcin Szlarek & Julio Rico won the elimination round to claim the fifth and last spot in the Final in a thrilling match just overtaking the Tallaght Rockets duo of Edgaras Valavicius & Felipe Viana.
They say in sport timing is everything, and in this King of the Court format no truer words are spoken, as it was a similar story in the Women’s section with Lu Sombrah and Melissa Cheviron dominating rounds one and two scoring 26 pts from the Queen’s side to the winners 14.
But Rosas & Jankowitz’s had the resilience to hang in and that was rewarded as they pulled clear to claim victory by a single point as the buzzer sounded to end the third and final round. Miriam Gormally & Kama Teterycz were back in third after Gad & ren and Avramovic & Lawlor were eliminated.
The Rosas/Jankowitz victory was even more remarkable as it was their first ’round’ win in the whole competition, which shows the importance of peaking at the right time.