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SA govt's bold bid to secure Beach Volleyball rights
Ben Hook • November 21st, 2025 4:08 pm
Adelaide is poised to make an unprecedented bid to secure a second straight Beach Volleyball World Championship in 2027.
SEN understands the South Australian Government and its Major Events arm has engaged market research analysts to determine the economic impact of the current event with discussions underway to weigh up bid for the next World Championship, which are held every two years.
Staff from Adelaide market research firm Quid Venistis were on the grounds on Thursday, interviewing a range of stakeholders including athletes, officials and fans.
Quid Venistis is a Latin phrase for “What Brings You Here?”
A city hosting back-to-back Championships would be a first for the sport. Since the first event in 1997, no country has ever hosted consecutive Beach Volleyball World Championships let alone a city.
SA Government’s Major Events team is a department within the SA Tourism Commission and been the catalyst to deliver elite sports events and other festivals including the Tour Down Under, LIV Golf, WOMAD and Gather Round to Adelaide.
Memorial Drive, host of the centre court for the championships, has undergone a major upgrade across two stages over the last six years.
But outside of the week-long Adelaide International Tennis Tournament in January, a warm up for the Australian Open, it has largely lay dormant and is crying out for events like the Beach Volleyball World Championships to justify the $54 million investment.
The 2025 Championships have been utilized as an inaugural trial for the 2032 Brisbane Olympics and working through the logistics of a second staging also has merit.
The news lands despite Australia’s disappointing exit from both the men’s and women’s draws, with no Aussie pairing making it past the round of 32.
Stefie Fejes and Jasmine Fleming were stopped by the Brazilian pairing of Carolina Solberg and Rebecca Cavalcanti,while Australia’s top men’s team Nark Nicolaidis and Isaac Carracher fell to Germany’s Sven Winter and Lukas Pfretschner.
“We are absolutely devastated,” Volleyball Australia’s high performance boss Craig Marshall said.
“They came here to go deeper in the event, but you know there are no guarantees in sport.”
But despite the early departures, Marshall is adamant his charges are set to make their mark in the sport across the next two Olympic cycles, culminating in Los Angeles 2028 and Brisbane 2032.
“If you really look at game by game, there were a lot of real positives for us out of the tournament,” he said.
“And the other part for us was we wanted the public to see us go about our business a certain way. “We wanted them to see us play, be part of the environment and go, ‘I want to see them play again tomorrow night’.
“And I think we did that. I think a lot of our teams showed a lot of character that made people get on board, whether we were winning or losing.
They could see the fight and the grit from our teams.”
