After a two-year break caused by the Covid 19 pandemic, the Volleyball Challenger Cup is returning to the international calendar with new tournaments for 2022 to be held in Croatia for women’s volleyball and in South Korea for men’s volleyball. The winners of these tournaments will have the opportunity to play next, ie in 2023, in the prestigious League of Nations, thus replacing the last-placed national team from 2022. Both Challenger Cups will be played from July 28-31.
The host of the women’s tournament is the city of Zadar, while the men’s tournament will be held at the Jamsil Student Gymnasium in Seoul, South Korea.
This year, a new formula with eight national teams was implemented. Each tournament will feature two matches a day, ie the quarterfinals in the first two days, July 28 and 29, and the semifinals on July 30. The finals and the match for third place are scheduled for the last day of the tournament, July 31.
The Challenger Cup was supposed to be played in Croatia first in 2020, then in 2021, but due to the coronary virus pandemic, it had to be postponed both times due to epidemiological measures. Therefore, this is in a way a ‘third luck’, as mentioned by the president of the Croatian Volleyball Federation, Ante Baković:
„We did not give up on this extremely important competition for us, not even the world pandemic could stop us from wanting to organize the Challenger Cup. Our goal is to try to qualify for the League of Nations, the world league of the best volleyball teams, through this tournament next year, because we are convinced that we have a place there. In the meantime, in those two years, there have been some changes in our lineup, from the menu to some players, but we have not lost anything on the quality we have. And that is why we are all looking forward to another volleyball holiday in Zadar.”
The Challenger Cup in Zadar will feature Croatia and Puerto Rico, Colombia, Kazakhstan, the Czech Republic and Cameroon, as well as the last team from this year’s League of Nations, which will be played from May 13 and will feature 16 teams. champions of the European League Gold Group.
Croatian volleyball players will have a lot of competitions this summer, and very few days off. Already on May 25, the full representative drive of the European Golden League will start, where one of the groups will be played in Varaždin, as well as the Final Four, which we are hosting on June 18 and 19. Shortly afterwards, on June 25, the Mediterranean Games begin in Algeria, where the Croatian national team is running for one of the medals. The Mediterranean Games end on July 5 and are already from 28-31. The Challenger Cup is played in July in Zadar. After this competition, the qualifications for the European Championship for volleyball players start from August 20th to September 11th, and the icing on the cake is the performance at the World Championships in the Netherlands and Poland, from September 3rd to October 15th.
