With beach tennis pop, professionals envision a new era in sport

When Marcela Vita started teaching beach tennis in a park in Curitiba, in 2015, her mother gave strength in her role as a student to try to attract others interested in the sport. People who knew how to play were counted on their fingers, and there were rarely four of them available to close a game.

Marcela, 31, is currently one of the best beach tennis players in the world and has just won two important international titles. The Vita Beach Sports academy, of which she is a partner in the capital of Paraná, has around 600 enrolled students.

The increase in popularity of sand sports in recent years, even more accelerated during the pandemic, made beach tennis a social and leisure phenomenon even in cities without beaches, such as São Paulo and Curitiba.

The formation of a broader base of practitioners and interested parties, in turn, helps to leverage the professional circuit of this young sport, born in Italy in the late 1980s.

She arrived in Brazil in 2008, in Rio de Janeiro, according to the Brazilian Tennis Confederation (CBT). The first tournament in the country was held in Florianópolis two years later.

Joana Cortez, a former professional tennis player who won three medals at the Pan American Games, became one of the forerunners in the sand and already in 2008 participated in her first World Championship, at the Italian Ravenna. It came in third place.

In addition to extending her athletic career, the 42-year-old from Rio saw the opportunity to help develop beach tennis, which at the time was totally amateur. She brought a teaching methodology from Italy, started to give classes and also to organize tournaments.

“Just as people came to Brazil to learn about beach volleyball, we went to Italy to seek knowledge and train at the highest level. In the beginning, it was seen as a summer sport, we didn’t know if it would catch, nor did it so much visibility,” says Joana. “But I bet, I saw that it had a lot of potential. Having good athletes representing the country with results helped to leverage the sport.”

In 2013, the country won its first World Cup title, created a year earlier. It repeated the feat in 2018, 2019 and 2021, when for the first time the competition left Russia and was held in Rio de Janeiro, with a good public presence in the stands set up in Copacabana. Now, Brazilians are four-time champions, as well as Italians (2012, 2014, 2015 and 2017). The Russians won in 2016.

With games in male, female and mixed doubles, this year’s edition was broadcast on SporTV and was played at the beginning of the month. 16 countries participated in the adult category and 8 in the youth category. In this one, Italy surpassed Brazil in the decision.

Both Marcela and Joana were part of the Brazilian adult team, also formed by Rafaella Miller, André Baran, Vinicius Font and Thales Santos.

At the same time, 900 athletes of different levels played the National Amateur Circuit on the sands of Copacabana.

The week after the World Cup, Brasília hosted a stage of the ITF Sand Series. The format debuted this year on the International Tennis Federation calendar as a bet to consolidate a series of four outstanding tournaments on the circuit, such as the four Grand Slam events in traditional tennis.

It was not a competition for countries, but the winning duo was formed by Brazilians Marcela Vita and Vitória Marchezini, who are only 15 years old.

Marcela, from Curitiba, played college tennis in the US and graduated in Physical Education in the country. In 2014, he discovered beach tennis on a trip to Barcelona and fell in love. The following year, back in Brazil, he left his job at a multinational to dedicate himself to the sport.

In addition to the difficulty of getting the classes initially, at that time she needed to go to Santa Catarina to play amateur championships. When he saw athletes who were acting professionally, he came to believe that he could also reach that level.

“When I started, there was no visibility, sponsorship was almost nil. But I always believed that the sport would gradually grow and today we see this explosion. Large companies are looking at it with different eyes, it is the beginning of an era”, he says .

In 2017, she and businessman Gabriel Farah, also her coach and brother-in-law, bet on the construction of a gym, which opened its doors in 2019. In the pandemic, Vita Beach Sports saw its number of students grow by 40%.

“I dare say that beach tennis took on a social role, giving the opportunity for many people who were sedentary then to get out of inertia, practice physical activity, have fun and greatly improve self-esteem. With so many attributes, the ‘boom’ is just one a transient and transitory moment for real consolidation”, says Rafael Westrupp, president of CBT.

According to him, this year almost US$ 150,000 (R$ 845 thousand) were distributed in tournament prizes in the country. The goal for next year is to get closer to the range of US$ 500 thousand (R$ 2.8 million). Banco de Brasília, the entity’s main sponsor, also sponsors tournaments and athletes in the modality.

“The Beach Tennis professional category developed long before the massification of amateur sport. It is clear that, with the exponential increase in the volume of practitioners, the replenishment of stock and the revelation of new talents will happen more intensely and continuously”, he says Westrupp.

However, professionals who manage to dedicate themselves only to their own training and competitions are still rare. Most also teach classes or have side projects linked to practice.

Today Marcela manages to be one of the exceptions. She hopes that the new generation can increasingly make a living from their careers as athletes and demands advances in the international calendar, for example, bringing dates of tournaments in the same country closer to facilitate the movement of athletes.

“We live in a bubble, we think the sport is huge, but there is a lot to improve. It is still concentrated in a few countries. It would need to have a business unit at the ITF focused on beach tennis to develop institutionally and build a long-term base term”, says Joana.

On the other hand, the carioca celebrates the scenario very different from the one experienced until recently. “Six years ago, we were hunting people to take to the World Cup in Russia. In São Paulo there was only a court at a club, they went to Santos to play. There was also resistance from the tennis people, and today everyone builds the beach tennis arena in the gyms. “