Membership
B.J. Hoeptner Evans
Manager, Media Relations and Publications
Phone: (719) 228-6800
E-Mail: bj.evans@usav.org
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (Oct. 5, 2011) – Three U.S. men’s beach volleyball teams will begin play on Thursday in the first round of the Morocco Open, the final men’s event on the FIVB Swatch World Tour 2011.
Matt Fuerbringer (Costa Mesa, Calif.) and Nick Lucena (Santa Barbara, Calif.), seeded 11th, will open Thursday against Italy’s 22nd-ranked Matteo and Paolo Ingrosso. Fuerbringer and Lucena played in 13 FIVB events this season, finishing on the podium with a silver medal in Quebec.
Jake Gibb (Bountiful, Utah) and Sean Rosenthal (Redondo Beach, Calif.), ranked 14th, will face Norway’s 19th-seeded Tarjei Skarlund and Martin Spinnangr. Gibb and Rosenthal played 13 events on the FIVB World Tour this season, finishing with second place (Shanghai, China) and one third (Quebec).
Finally, 23rd-ranked Casey Jennings (Las Vegas, Nev.) and Kevin Wong (Honolulu, Hawaii) will play Turkey’s 10th-seeded Selçuk Sekerci and Volkan Gogtepe. Jennings and Wong played seven FIVB World Tour events together this season with their best finish a fifth place at the A1 Grand Slam in Klagenfurt, Austria.
It is the first time ever that the FIVB Swatch World Tour stops in Morocco. The north-African country did host three challengers earlier, in Casablanca in 2004, 2005 and 2006. South Africa is the only other African nation who hosted World Tour events – in 1995, 2004 and 2005 in Cape Town and in Durban in 1996.
The $190.000 single gender Morocco Open is the 14th and final men’s event of the 2011 FIVB Swatch World Tour. The women finish next month with their 16th event in Phuket, Thailand.
For more information on the Morocco Open, click here.