OSTRAVA, Czech Republic – There were 300, maybe 400-odd fans at the 2019 Montpellier One Star.
That was more than enough for Stefan Boermans.
Few, if any, of the patrons that afternoon in Montpellier had ever heard of Boermans, then a 24-year-old rookie on the Beach Pro Tour, playing alongside notable journeyman Dirk Boehle. In five previous events, they’d only qualified for two main draws, with a career-high of ninth, at a One Star in Budapest, Hungary. But they found some magic that weekend in south France, winning five straight matches, the final of which came against France’s own Quincy Aye and Arnaud Gauthier-Rat, the top seed in the tournament and the team who no doubt commanded nearly every head in the crowd.
Boermans drank it up – the fans, the cheers, the stage. Even a One Star – since renamed Futures — gold medal match is a gold medal match.
“It was a nice final,” Boermans recalled on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “From there on it was ‘OK, I want to do more and more.’”
It is easy to see why. Boermans, despite being 24 at the time, had only just begun playing beach at a respectable level. He had used his 6-foot-8 frame to play indoor until he plateaued in the Netherlands when he was 22, just three or four years after picking up the sport at all. A quick study, he turned to beach, promptly won a gold medal in his first year trying, and the Dutch Federation, in need of a second team to challenge Alex Brouwer and Robert Meeuwsen, looked to Boermans as its next promising blocker. After that gold medal in Montpellier, ‘the national team came along and said we want to put you with Yorick [de Groot] and we want to put you on track for the Paris Olympics,” Boermans said. “I said ‘Paris Olympics? Me? OK, let’s give it a try!’ From that moment, it got more to reality that we were chasing something.”
It would not take long for them to catch it.
They’d begin the 2021 season, their first as partners, by dropping their first two qualifiers, in Doha – to a pair of Swedish teenagers named David Ahman and Jonatan Hellvig – and the first of the three Cancun bubble tournaments. Boermans did the natural thing and wondered if they should stick it out.
Did they really want to be stuck in this hotel in Cancun for another three weeks?
It’s a wonder what might have happened had he listened to that natural instinct. The next week, they not only qualified but began the main draw with a stunner over the World Champs, Russia’s Viacheslav Krasilnikov and Oleg Stoyanovskiy (10-21, 21-15, 15-12), a win that would propel them to a fifth place finish.
Then they did it again, qualifying for the final Cancun Four Star and taking out another giant in Poland’s Michal Bryl and Bartosz Losiak. In the quarterfinals, he’d be introduced – literally, off the court, and figuratively on it – to Phil Dalhausser and Nick Lucena, the American greats who had already locked up their spot in the Tokyo Olympic Games.
“I’d never seen Phil before and he said ‘I’m Phil, nice to meet you,’” Boermans recalled, laughing. “I was flabbergasted, was he messing with me? To this day I still don’t know… In Cancun it all started, getting to know the big names, being a part of them.”
And then he became one himself.
Three months later, after qualifying again in Sochi, and then again in Ostrava, where Boermans would beat that friendly giant named Dalhausser, Boermans and de Groot were alas directly into the main draw in Gstaad.
They took advantage, running straight through the field, taking down a host of elite teams in the process: Nils Ehlers and Lars Fluggen, Cherif Younousse and Ahmed Tijan, Juliius Thole and Clemens Wickler, Ehlers and Fluggen again, Nikita Liamin and Taras Myskiv, and then Younousse and Tijan again for gold.
Winning Montpellier, a developmental stop and the lowest run on the Beach Pro Tour ladder, is an excellent accomplishment.
Winning Gstaad is something only the elite few can claim.
Boermans did it in his first try.
“It helped me learn,” he said, “that we’re capable of going to the Olympics.”
Stefan Boermans and Yorick de Groot/Volleyball World photo
He’d do that, leaving no doubt about it, either. Boermans and de Groot were the first Dutch team to qualify for Paris and entered as the seven seed and a medal contender. But along the way, he became so much more than your standard run of the mill world class beach volleyball player.
An extrovert’s extrovert, Boermans began shooting tutorial videos for fans, and the engagement and following boost he received — more than 50,000 followers in 18 months — encouraged him to do more. While at tournaments, he can invariably be seen mingling with the crowd, interacting with them before, after, and indeed during matches. He is, alongside Sweden, Norway and Qatar, a crowd favorite wherever he goes. It’s a favoritism that has been earned, by the virtue of Boermans simply being Stefan Boermans, the outgoing, friendly face of the Beach Pro Tour.
“I consider myself an ambassador for my sport, so the more I can do for my sport, the more the sport will hopefully grow and I can benefit from it,” Boermans said. “Everybody can contribute and doing what they can to contribute.
“I also enjoy it. I play with Yorick who is less active on social media but as soon as he starts talking about volleyball you can tell how passionate he is, how much he knows about tactics and gameplan, he’s playing the chess game in his mind, always.”
He thinks back to that Montpellier final, with the small but passionate crowd of less than 1,000.
“To me, that was enough,” he said. “I said ‘I want to do this every week.’ No matter where it is, I want to play tournaments, enjoy the people, and play volleyball. That motivated me to train, get better, work on the physical part, work on the ball control.”
It’s worked, all right. In the past 13 tournaments, Boermans and de Groot have finished outside of the top five just three times. They’ve won gold in Doha, played in the finals of Ostrava, stood on the podium in Hamburg. They went four matches without dropping a set at the Olympic Games and opened the 2025 season with a bronze in Saquarema and a gold in Brasilia.
At every stop along the way, Boermans is growing a following, online and in-person, becoming the ambassador the sport needs, and it is giving itself right back to him. He says this just before dinner in the Czech Republic, at one of the best stops on the Beach Pro Tour, and he smiles, as he does often, before saying:
“I’m living quite a good life now.”
