This is Europe. This is Europe.
Chanting. Did you hear it?
I met Julia at a surf camp in France in 2016, and we played roundnet there already. On the 2nd of January 2017, on Maroubra beach in Sydney, I met her sister Franzi, and we played there too. Nobody on that beach was thinking about a world championship. There wasn't one yet.
Munich in 2019 was not a scene. It was a handful of us playing four or five times a week with no real idea how to play. Then, that summer, a YouTube channel called How to Roundnet appeared and changed the sport for everyone in Europe with access to a screen. It became my bible. In November I flew to coed nationals in Savannah, Georgia, and saw the Americans live for the first time: Preston Bies, Tyler Cisek, PJ Showalter, Olivia Jenki. Then I came home to Munich and taught my friends everything I had just learned.
That was the entire system. No federation behind it, no funding, no plan. A hall, a drive, and someone who had seen something and wanted to pass it on.
In December 2019, two teams from Graz and one from Vienna came to Munich for the first round of the German league. There is a photograph from that day. In it stands a woman who would be world champion five years later. Next to her, two sisters who would take silver together. Somewhere in the same frame are seven players who now wear the Austrian national jersey. Nobody in that picture knew any of it. We were people who had found a small net and did not want to go home.
Three weeks later, in a hall in Regensburg, Franzi and I won a three-set semifinal against a table tennis player from Frankfurt and his partner.
His name was Lukas Eisenträger. On Thursday he became world champion.
In February 2020 in Cologne, my team finished fifth. We went out in the quarters to a veteran and a young player from the city. The veteran stopped competing soon after. The young one did not. A year and a half later he teamed up with the table tennis player from Frankfurt, and his name is Paul Siemer.
In June 2020 I was in Vienna to play pickup. I asked whether we should do it again the following Saturday and was told no, because they wanted to watch someone play beach volleyball. They thought she had potential and were trying to talk her into the sport. It took me almost a year to meet her. On Thursday she won the women's individual world title.
In July, Franzi and I drove six hours to Bern for a mixed tournament, in a pandemic, singing along to High School Musical, because there was nowhere else to play. People thought we were crazy to go that far for a spikeball tournament. We finished third. We lost the semifinal in three close games to Clemens von Hanisch and Johanna Schumann. He had been European runner-up in 2019, behind Benny Bachler; she had won the women's European title that same year, with Julia. Clemens went on to take bronze with Germany in 2022, and this week in London he stood on the sideline as a coach. In the round of sixteen that same day we played a pair from Roundnet Club Bern. One of them was Ramon Felix, who is now a mixed world champion.
None of this was a project. It was a calendar with almost nothing in it, and people who filled it anyway.
It's 2:24 a.m. in London. I have been writing for three hours and this still isn't finished. Europe has taken all three individual titles - men's, women's and mixed. Before the tournament the optimists were hoping for one, and I would have called anyone predicting three insane. Julia and Franzi have silver. Alt and Paysan have bronze. The squad brackets start in a few hours, so none of it is over.
The Julia from that surf camp is Julia Stadler. Eight years after we first put a net up in France, she became a vice world champion, with her sister.
I am still shaking, and I don't think I have understood it yet. If it feels like this from here, I won't pretend to know what the six of them feel.
Chanting. Did you hear it?
Seven years ago it was a game on a beach in Sydney. Tonight it is a chant in London. The only thing connecting the two is that nobody stopped coming.
Written in London in the early hours of 31 August 2024, the night Europe won all three individual titles at the Roundnet World Championship. Published here two years later.