TALLAHASSEE, Florida — The first three Elites of the 2025 Beach Pro Tour season felt like a harbinger, all signs pointing to a year-long slugfest between the United States and Brazil. The finals of Quintana Roo, Brasilia, and Saquarema all featured some variation of the same combination: U.S.A. vs. Brazil. Rebecca and Carol vs. Terese Cannon and Megan Kraft, Thamela and Victoria vs. Kristen Nuss and Taryn Brasher. Nuss and Brasher vs. Rebecca and Carol.
Around and around we’d go, it was easy to think then.
It was, of course, bound to change, and in Ostrava, it did.
Latvia’s Tina Graudina and Anastasija Samoilova broke through, making their first final in nearly three years. Yes, they’d lose that final, to Thamela and Victoria, but they’d disrupted the pattern, shocked the system. Then they’d do it again in Gstaad, ringing another cowbell home, this one a silver.
But would this be the season of oh so close? It seemed so, as they made the semifinals in Montreal and finished one spot off the podium, then did so again in Cape Town. It would have fit the narrative. This was the year of the Americas, of the sport’s traditional powers — U.S.A. and Brazil — going toe-to-toe, with five of the top six teams in the world hailing from one of the two.
In November, at the World Championships, when it mattered most, Graudina and Samoilova took the rough draft of that script, hit control all, delete — and wrote a historic one of their own. They swept everyone in their path, from Mexico to Italy to Japan and the Netherlands and Germany and, yes, the vaunted U.S. It brought them to the semifinals against the No. 1 team in the world, the podium regulars in Thamela and Victoria, the team that knocked them out of Saquarema and stood in their way of their first Elite gold in the Czech Republic.
They never stood a chance.
Graudina and Samoilova orchestrated a masterpiece in that semifinal, beating Thamela and Victoria by a margin they’d never before experienced, a 21-16, 21-11 shocker that lasted just half an hour. Fittingly, poetically, perfectly, it would be a third straight team from the U.S. or Brazil that Graudina and Samoilova would meet in the finals, Nuss and Brasher, the three seed who had quietly gone about their work en route to the finals.
There was nothing quiet about that final. It was fantastic, a beautiful symphony of beach volleyball that saw two of the world’s best teams playing some of their finest ball of the season. And for one last time, Latvia, the world’s dragonslayer, took out one last dragon, upsetting Nuss and Brasher, 21-15, 15-21, 15-11.
“They were the best team all tournament long,” Friend said. “That’s what’s so great about this for them is being rewarded for being the best team.”
And they were, as voted by their peers, the best team all season, the 2025 Team of the Year.
Honorable Mention
- Kristen Nuss, Taryn Brasher, USA
- Carol Salgado, Rebecca Cavalcanti, Brazil
- Thamela Coradello, Victoria Lopes, Brazil
2023 Team of the Year: Ana Patricia Silva, Duda Lisboa
2024 Team of the Year: Ana Patricia Silva, Duda Lisboa
Tina Graudina is the 2025 MVP/Volleyball World photo
MVP: Tina Graudina
Honorable Mention
- Victoria Lopes, Brazil
- Kristen Nuss, USA
- Brandie Wilkerson, Canada
- Carol Salgado, Brazil
Midway through the World Championships, as Tina Graudina and Anastasija Samoilova dispatched one team after the next, sweeping their way to the finals in a show of dominance we had never before seen from Latvia, we began referring to Graudina as MVT.
That’s how good the 27-year-old Latvian was in the biggest event of the year and, really, the entire season. During the World Championships, she sided out at an otherworldly 72 percent, put away 56 percent of her transition opportunities, and outblocked her opponents 18 to 14. It was the bow on top of a career year, one in which Graudina and Samoilova won a career-high three medals, added two more semifinal appearances on top of that, made 35% more than their previous career-high in prize money, and won Latvia’s first World Championship medal ever.
It’s hard to think of a more dynamic force on the Beach Pro Tour than Graudina, a player who is at once one of the best blockers in the world — as you will see below — best setters, and someone who shines on the sport’s biggest stages.
For the first, and likely not last, time of her career, she is the Most Valuable Player in Beach Volleyball.
2023 MVP: Duda Lisboa
2024 MVP: Duda Lisboa
Kristen Nuss is the 2025 Beach Pro Tour Defensive Player of the Year/Volleyball World photo
Best Defensive Player: Kristen Nuss
Honorable Mention
- Victoria Lopes, Brazil
- Cinja Tillmann, Germany
- Melissa Humana-Paredes, Canada
On the eve of the Gstaad Elite, the defending gold medalists, Kristen Nuss and Taryn Brasher, sat down in the lobby and discussed the new goal for the most peculiar team in beach volleyball. They’d already rewritten the script, showing beach fans and future players that, yes, you can be a 6-foot-4 blocker from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and a 5-foot-6 defender from Louisiana, two states with zero natural beaches on which to play beach volleyball, and you can become the No. 1 team in the world.
Their new goal?
To be, as they worded it, a glitch in the beach volleyball system.
Consider that mission accomplished for Nuss, the 2025 Defensive Player of the Year who has now been voted as such in three consecutive seasons.
An unofficial measurement for how elite an athlete is at a particular skill is how easy they make their specialty look. No player, be it male or female, makes defense look as easy Nuss, who simply glided, alongside Taryn Brasher, to another Gstaad cowbell, an undefeated year on American soil, three gold medals, the highest winning percentage of their careers, and a World Championship final.
At just 28 years old, Nuss is already piling up a laundry list of accolades and enough medals and trinkets to fill up her New Orleans apartment.
She has already proven to be a glitch in beach volleyball’s system.
2023 Best Defensive Player: Kristen Nuss
2024 Best Defensive Player: Kristen Nuss
Valentina Gottardi is the 2025 Offensive Player of the Year/Volleyball World photo
Best Offensive Player: Valentina Gottardi
Honorable Mention
- Brandie Wilkerson, Canada
- Taryn Brasher, USA
- Carol Salgado, Brazil
- Kelly Cheng, USA
One of the traits that comes with the territory of being an elite offensive player is the level of fear you instill in your opponents when you have the ball in your hands.
No one does this more than Valentina Gottardi.
There is no female player in the world who hits with the power of the 23-year-old Italian, and no one who comes even close to matching the severe angles she hits. This comes, of course, with the occasional error (406 on the season, compared to 282 from her partner, Reka Orsi Toth) but that’s a calculated risk she’s comfortable taking.
“If I spike as hard as I can, of course sometimes there are mistakes. It’s normal. If I do a strange thing, sometimes it goes well. Other times, no, it doesn’t. OK, it happens,” Gottardi said in Montreal this year. “I think that it is part of me. Yes, I make mistakes, but it’s because I love scoring, so I try to score in different ways and try new things, different things that are not the common ones. I try to find my way.”
She has found her way and then some. Gottardi and Orsi Toth exploded into the top-tier on the Beach Pro Tour this season, winning Italy’s first Elite gold medal ever at the Hamburg Elite, her $71,750 in prize money nearly doubled Gottardi’s previous career high, and they finished with four straight top-five finishes, including a fifth at the World Championships. Much of this is due to Gottardi’s offensive prowess, a 64 percent sideout rate coupled with a 52 percent transition efficiency that had her receive more votes for Offensive Player of the Year than the rest of the nominees combined.
2023 Best Offensive Player: Ana Patricia Silva
2024 Best Offensive Player: Duda Lisboa
Brandie Wilkerson is the 2025 Blocker of the Year/Volleyball World photo
Best Blocker: Brandie Wilkerson
Honorable Mention
- Carol Salgado, Brazil
- Tina Graudina, Latvia
- Valentina Gottardi, Italy
- Taryn Brasher, USA
Sports are an inherently copycat business.
One team or individual presents a new formula for success and suddenly every other team is attempting their own version of it.
How many tongues do we see stuck out as a nod to Michael Jordan?
Steph Curry himself has ignited a 3-point revolution, and Caitlin Clark is doing the same.
When Phil Dalhausser entered the Beach Pro Tour, he was one of the tallest men on it. When he left, with his Olympic gold medal and status as one of the greatest players of all time, he wasn’t even in the top-30.
For the longest time, every federation in professional beach volleyball did its best to imitate the formula for success created by Misty May-Treanor and her six feet of sunshine, Kerri Walsh Jennings. All but one Olympic gold medalist — Kira Walkenhorst in 2016 — from 2004 through 2024 stood 6-foot-3 or taller, from Walsh Jennings to Alix Klineman (6-foot-5) to Ana Patricia Silva (6-foot-4).
Brandie Wilkerson is changing the narrative.
Standing just 5-foot-10, Wilkerson is a blocker unlike anything the women’s game has seen before. She’s dynamic, starting one place, loading all the way to the sand — and then flying into the other. Meanwhile, her hands are independent, active, with quicksilver reaction time that makes her an expert at trickery and deception. She is the foundational reason why her and Melissa Humana-Paredes are one of the most difficult block-defense teams on the Beach Pro Tour.
How successful an athlete is at their craft can be measured by stats and wins and losses, yes, but another metric is this: The number of copycats you inspire.
Valentina Gottardi? Tina Graudina? Carol Salgado? All nominees for this award? They all stand 6 feet or below, not to mention longtime world No. 1 Thamela Coradello, who also stands just 6 feet tall.
Wilkerson is single-handedly changing how the women’s game views its blockers.
Which is why, for the third straight year, and fourth time of her career, she has been voted the Blocker of the Year.
2023 Best Blocker: Brandie Wilkerson
2024 Best Blocker: Brandie Wilkerson
Valentina Gottardi is the 2025 Server of the Year/Volleyball World photo
Best Server: Valentina Gottardi
Honorable Mention
- Louisa Lippmann, Germany
- Victoria Lopes, Brazil
- Carol Salgado, Brazil
You can count on one hand, the number of players in beach volleyball who make their serve in appointment viewing.
Their names are Valentina Gottardi and Evandro Goncalves, and both are the 2025 Servers of the Year.
What makes it such must-watch VBTV? Because nobody hits a float serve quite like Gottardi. It comes with pace, dizzying movement and the potential for an explosive run of three, four, sometimes five straight points. If it is her unmatched power and spectacular angles that instill so much fear in her opponents when she is on offense, it is the speed and anxiety of simply fighting off her serve that does the same when she is at the service line.
On the year, Gottardi’s opponents were in system just 73 percent of the time, whereas the eight teams in the quarterfinals of the World Championships were all averaging well into the 80s. Per Beach Data, teams passed “very good” on only 39 percent of her serves, “good” on 32 percent, and either bad to outright aced the remaining 39 percent — a huge number. It was the central variably to Italy holding their opponents to a 56 percent sideout rate, lower, even, than Kristen Nuss and Taryn Brasher, who boast the Defensive Player of the Year.
In a recent poll, 56 percent of responders viewed serving as an offensive play, while 44 percent said it was a defensive aspect of the game.
With Valentina Gottardi, she’s always on offense.
2023 Best Server: Valentina Gottardi
2024 Best Server: Esmee Bobner
Thamela Coradello is the 2025 Most Improved Player/Volleyball World photo
Most Improved: Thamela Coradello
Honorable Mention
- Victoria Lopes, Brazil
- Reka Orsi Toth, Italy
- Linda Bock, Germany
- Molly Shaw, USA
Nothing says more about the remarkably high level of play from Thamela Coradello in 2025 that she could win the Most Improved Player during a season in which she and Victoria Lopes entered as the No. 1 ranked team in the world.
There is, in a literal sense, no upward trajectory possible when you’re already No. 1 — yet Thamela found it, while, unbelievably, her world No. 1 partner, Victoria Lopes, was No. 2 in the voting. They entered this season on the backs of three straight medals in 2024 as they began their partnership, and it’s possible some were left wondering: Was this team for real, or was it a honeymoon phase?
A 13th-place finish to start the year in Quintana Roo made a case for the latter.
The rest of the season did not.
Thamela and Victoria rattled off five medals — two gold, two silver, one bronze — a fourth-place finish at the World Championships, and quadruple their previous career-highs for prize money. The 25-year-old blocker finished the year tied with Valentina Gottardi in sideout percent (64) while getting served double the amount of Victoria, outblocked her opponents 225-198, passed in system on 84 percent of her 1,743 passes, and limited her errors to the point that teams knew she would not beat herself — ever.
You had to go out and beat her — and Thamela made that an incredibly difficult task, as they finished 48-21 on the year.
And if she’s winning Most Improved during a season in which they accomplished all of that, there is no telling just how high her ceiling is.
2023 Most Improved Player: Valentina Gottardi
2024 Most Improved Player: Zoe Verge-Depre
Leona Kernen is the 2025 Rookie of the Year/Volleyball World photo
Rookie of the Year: Leona Kernen
Honorable Mention
- Linda Bock, Germany
- Tetiana Lazarenko, Ukraine
- Anna Grune, Germany
There is making an entrance.
And then there is kicking down the door of the Beach Pro Tour.
Such is what Leona Kernen did in 2025.
The 19-year-old Swiss fireball opened up the season not with the nerves and careful play one might expect of a rookie playing alongside an Olympic bronze medal-winning veteran in Tanja Huberli, filling in for the massive shoes of new mom Nina Brunner, but with the panache and confidence of a serial winner.
Five straight matches did Kernen and Huberli win en route to a silver medal at the Yucatan Challenge. That, in itself, was impressive enough. But with rookies and youngsters, it is always worth wondering: Could they maintain that level of play.
A week later, that question was answered, loudly and in bold print: Yes. Kernen and Huberli took fifth in Quintana Roo, slaying a pair of dragons in Kristen Nuss and Taryn Brasher, and Ana Patricia Silva and Duda Lisboa, on the way. They’d take out their peers, Anouk Verge-Depre and Zoe Verge-Depre, to win gold at their home Futures in Spiez and make a run to the semifinals in Gstaad.
It is such a shame that their season was cut short there. Huberli required surgery, and Kernen was left bouncing around her final two events with two different partners. But her work in the first four months of her debut season was enough to win a competitive race for the 2025 Rookie of the Year.
2023 Rookie of the Year: Valentina Gottardi
2024 Rookie of the Year: Megan Kraft
Tina Graudina and Melissa Humana-Paredes are the 2025 Sportswomen of the Year/Volleyball World photo
Sportsmanship Award: Tina Graudina, Melissa Humana-Paredes
Honorable Mention
- Carol Salgado, Brazil
- Taryn Brasher, USA
- Terese Cannon, USA
- Anastasija Samoilova, Latvia
Sports fans don’t like ties, and for good reason. We don’t like them either.
And yet…
When it comes to the Sportsmanship Award, when two of the best humans in the sport of beach volleyball finish the voting with the exact same number of votes, it just felt right to allow Tina Graudina and Melissa Humana-Paredes to stand at the top of this proverbial podium together.
There are few women whose ubiquitous smiles light up the room like Humana-Paredes and Graudina. It isn’t just because of the Colgate-commercial-worthy whiteness — it’s how genuine both of them are, with everyone around them.
A personal story that speaks to what a wonderful individual Graudina is. I took a recruiting trip to Latvia this summer, watching a tournament in the coastal town of Ventspils before spending a day and a half in the main city of Riga. Graudina wanted to know EVERYTHING. When we chatted the next week in Hamburg, she was practically vibrating with excitement that I was able to see her home country. This isn’t an exception, either. She’s that way with everyone she meets, eager to chat, to see how you’re doing, to know about your life and experiences.
And while this interaction with Humana-Paredes came in 2023, and not 2025, it is also a testament to the kind of individual she is. We were both competing in AVP New Orleans, and my son was due on the Monday following the tournament. Every time we crossed paths that weekend, she checked in on Delaney, if there was any news, if I needed anything.
Just as this was no exception with Graudina, this is par for the course for Humana-Paredes: She cares about her peers, the competitors who are looking to knock her off the podium, on a deeply human level.
For that reason, among so many others, they are the 2025 Sportswomen of the Year.
2023 Sportsmanship Award: Melissa Humana-Paredes
2024 Sportsmanship Award: Laura Ludwig
Adelaide, host of the World Championships, is the 2025 Event of the Year/Volleyball World photo
Event of the Year: World Championships, Adelaide, Australia
Honorable Mention
- Ostrava Elite
- Gstaad Elite
- Joao Pessoa Elite
- Montreal Elite
On the second day of the World Championships, our staff at Beach Volleyball World was bored. Bored because there were no fires to put out. Bored because everything was going so smoothly.
Bored because Adelaide, and the wonderful hosts of the tournament, had done such a tremendous job in the setup, operations, and organization of the event that there were no problems to fix, no hiccups to cure, nothing to solve.
It was a perfectly organized and run event.
It is an understatement of gargantuan proportions to say that hosting the World Championships is a massive undertaking, and an even bigger risk. Here you have the biggest event not named the Olympic Games, hosting 96 total teams from all continents and cultures and languages, hauling in staff, referees, TV, media, and everything else that goes into putting on a world class sporting event. And not a single thing went wrong.
Not only that, but the place sold out its final three days of competition, creating the electric atmosphere you see above, with 6,500 fans packing the house three straight nights. The evening atmosphere was excellent all 10 days, and the only complaint from the players came from the Australians themselves, who apologized profusely “for the shit weather, mate” — when the weather was a perfectly acceptable sunny and breezy with the occasional spattering of rain.
You could say it’s easy to make the World Championships the event of the year, but I’d argue it’s even easier to flop, as it is the event with the most eyeballs, the most pressure, the most financial risk.
And it was the runaway 2025 Event of the Year.
2023 Event of the Year: World Championships, Tlaxcala, Mexico
2024 Event of the Year: Paris Olympic Games
