The 2025 Beach Pro Tour Best Offensive Player is 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
