The women’s “Elite 8” matches will be played mid-day Friday with the winning teams playing in the late afternoon. The top half of the bracket has ninth-seeded Maria Antonelli/Carolina Salgado challenge top-seeded Talita Antunes/Larissa Franca in an all-Brazilian affair and fifth-seeded Summer Ross/Brooke Sweat of the United States meet fourth-seeded Laura Ludwig/Kira Walkenhorst of Germany.
In the lower bracket, 15th-seeded Heather Bansley/Brandie Wilkerson from Canada play 14th-seeded Lauren Fendrick/April Ross of the United States and second-seeded Chantal Laboureur/Julia Sude face seventh-seeded Melissa Humana-Paredes/Sarah Pavan of Canada.
Here is the men’s schedule on Friday.
• Nivaldo Diaz/Sergio Gonzalez, Cuba (No. 24 seeds) vs. Maarten Van Garderen/Christiaan Varenhorst, Netherlands (45)
• Adrian Gavira/Pablo Herrera, Spain (9) vs. Gustavo "Guto" Carvalhaes/Pedro Solberg, Brazil (8)
• Alison Cerutti/Bruno Oscar Schmidt, Brazil (5) vs. Ben Saxton/Chaim Schalk, Canada (13)
• Aleksandrs Samoilovs/Janis Smedins, Latvia (2) vs. Evandro Goncalves/Andre Loyola, Brazil (4)
• Phil Dalhausser/Nick Lucena, United States (3) vs. Christopher McHugh/Damien Schumann, Australia (35)
• Sam Pedlow/Sam Schachter, Canada (16) vs. Viacheslav Krasilnikov/Nikita Liamin, Russia (6)
• Piotr Kantor/Bartosz Losiak, Poland (7) vs. Dries Koekelkoren/Tom van Walle, Belgium (19)
• Clemens Doppler/Alexander Horst, Austria (12) vs. Jefferson Santos Pereira/Cherif Younousse, Qatar (23)
The $1-million FIVB Beach Volleyball World Championships presented by A1 is being played at the state-of-the art venue at Donauinsel in Vienna.
A total of 216-matches will be contested over a 10-day period at the World Championships where the winning men’s and women’s teams will each split the $60,000 first-place prizes. The women’s medal matches will be played on Saturday and the men’s on Sunday. With 96 teams from 40 countries in the competition, pool play highlights the first six days of play with the featured court being the 10,000-seat Red Bull Beach Arena.