Slovenia’s women aiming high at inaugural Beach Volley European Cup
News
Slovenia do have quite high expectations from the women’s competition of the inaugural CEV Beach Volley European Cup, which is due to take place later this week in Balikesir, Türkiye. The country’s top women’s duo, Tjaša Kotnik and Tajda Lovšin will be competing in Balikesir representing there ŠD Ludus.
The two players have claimed several medals from Beach Pro Tour events in recent years, finishing as high as fifth at two Beach Pro Tour Elite events held in 2022 and they also competed at EuroBeachVolley last year in Munich as well as earlier this summer in Vienna. In the exciting ‘club vs club’ format designed for the Beach Volley European Cup, they will be joined in Balikesir by reigning Slovenian champions Maja Marolt and Živa Javornik. Last week, Marolt and Javornik emerged victorious from the MEVZA Championships held in Innsbruck, Austria, and they quite successfully represented Slovenia in age-group competitions earlier in their careers. This means that Slovenia will be taking their current top two women’s teams to Türkiye to vie for continental honours in Balikesir.
On the men’s side, the team representing ŠD Ludus includes veteran Jernej Potočnik. At 42 years of age, he is a very experienced Beach Volleyball player with five national championship titles to his name, and he has contested international Snow Volleyball competitions as well.
The men’s and women’s teams of ŠD Ludus qualified for the first Beach Volley European Cup via the national club championship organised at the end of August in Ljubljana.
Tomislav Šmuc“As winners of the club championship at the national level, we have decided to participate with both teams at the finals in Türkiye. Our basic goal is to get to know the competition, to see how high we can reach with our teams in terms of quality and to win at least one of the matches, if possible. We also want to get an insight into the work of clubs from other countries and in this way set guidelines for our further work.”
Director of ŠD Ludus
The inaugural event in Balikesir will feature 10 clubs per gender from nine countries – with hosts Türkiye represented by two clubs in each gender.