This summer is actually a very nice summer for the local beach volleyball community. She can look forward to the European Championship, which was draped on Munich’s Königsplatz as part of the European Championships and whose finals on August 20th and 21st have long been sold out. Just ten days later, the German championship in Timmendorfer Strand celebrates its 30th anniversary. However, the anticipation is very cautious right now.
The Olympic sport, which recently achieved great success with the bronze medal at the World Championships for Cinja Tillmann and Svenja Müller in Rome, gives an extremely disharmonious picture at the national level. The most recent example: sports director Niclas Hildebrand was initially released from the German Volleyball Association (DVV) until revoked. The reason: “There was no longer a basis for joint cooperation,” said the new DVV sports director Julia Frauendorf of the SZ. So far there have been no official announcements on this matter, a back door remains open.
During Hildebrand’s four-year tenure, Julius Thole and Clemens Wickler won the World Championship silver medal in Hamburg in 2019, as did Tillmann and Müller. However, Tillmann is the very player who had sued the DVV for years. The reason: she and her former partner felt unfairly treated by the association because he guaranteed his national teams a right to start in international tournaments regardless of the world ranking position, but not Tillmann, although she was sometimes better in the world rankings. The claim for damages was initially successful, but was ultimately dismissed at the end of April.
Some people in the association and around him are now happy about Hildebrand’s resignation for the time being, including the three-time EM fifth and German champion of 2021, Alexander Walkenhorst, whom Hildebrand had once no longer considered due to a lack of perspectives. “He lied in all directions. There are two or three confidants who are chasing after him, everyone else is happy. This guy wasn’t good enough to be sports director,” Walkenhorst told SZ. He is definitely not impartial in this matter. When asked about his current employment contract, Hildebrand did not want to comment further on the matter, which has long since become a political issue. Because Jürgen Wagner, who coached the Olympic champions Julius Brink / Jonas Reckermann and Laura Ludwig / Kira Walkenhorst and now works as “Head of Beach Volleyball” at the central base in Hamburg, is now threatening to leave: “About two years ago we a high-performance sport concept created by Niclas and myself. Without Niclas, I hardly see the possibility of implementation. If this is confirmed, I will no longer be involved in the framework.”
If Wagner went too, it would be a medium-sized earthquake in German beach volleyball.
Emotions and personal feuds play into this cause. But behind the scenes there is also a battle raging over media rights, posts and the sovereignty of interpretation.
Savior? provocateur? Alexander Walkenhorst (left) has become a central figure in German beach volleyball.
(Photo: Florian Driver/Eibner/Imago)
And above all there is the question of how the conservative association, which has been conservative for far too long, is preparing for the future. Digitization, young talent, sports development, these are the future pillars. In order to force them, Hildebrand and the indoor sports director Christian Dünnes were given two new board members, at least that’s how they felt, Julia Frauendorf, a former management consultant, and Bernd Janssen, a former banker. You should clean up the store a little, cut off old pigtails, which in principle is not a bad approach. But if you look at the turnover in the association (in Halle and Beach) in the last two years, you could get the impression that hedge trimmers are being used.
Janssen denies that top-class sport will also be cut: “In 2022 we invested more money than ever before in top-class sport, more than half of our free funds, 60 percent of them for Beach and 40 percent for Halle.” At the same time, it is clear that the DVV’s successful beach volleyball division is under pressure. In any case, Hildebrand pushed for the centralization of the best beach volleyball teams in Hamburg, he wanted to build on the Olympic victories of 2012 and 2016. Medals at such major events are now the most important criterion for allowing DOSB funding to flow. Not everyone liked the centralization, also because most of the money went to Hamburg. “The only thing I can accuse Niclas of is that he directed all the resources to Hamburg. It was a disaster for the youngsters,” says Jörg Ahmann.
The 52-year-old won bronze with Axel Hager in Sydney in 2000, it was the first ever Olympic medal for German beach volleyball. With the sponsorship money, Ahmann financed a house, which at the time seemed unthinkable in this sport. At the end of last year he gave up his job at the DVV as head national trainer for youngsters, since then he has been the national base trainer in Stuttgart. “With two ten-hour fee positions for young national coaches, it shouldn’t be surprising if there are problems among the youngsters. We also have far too few coaches and clubs who train youngsters adequately,” he says.
There is also a generational conflict that is revealed, perhaps most clearly in the German beach volleyball series. The once proud flagship, formerly the most lucrative and most watched national series in Europe, has descended into chaos in recent years. During the corona pandemic, the association had completely failed to breathe life back into it, and in 2021 it canceled it entirely. And the fact that the marketing subsidiary Deutsche Volleyball Sport GmbH (DVS) went bankrupt at the end of April 2022 made everything even worse. The series was threatened – until Alexander Walkenhorst jumped into the vacuum.
With his start-up he took over the license and thus secured the staging of the tour. It is streamed on the channel Spontent, whose managing director is Walkenhorst. He sees himself as a pioneer and pioneer in the digital future, the fans are interactively involved. Walkenhorst does it quite well, he has found many supporters, in the association, also in the field of players who see him as a kind of savior of beach volleyball. After all, there is someone who takes things into their own hands, that’s the tenor.
Sees many problems in the beach volleyball summer of 2022: Jörg Ahmann, the bronze winner from Sydney 2000
(Photo: Florian Peljak)
For others he is a provocateur who overshoots the mark.
At the tournament in Munich, player representative Jonas Reinhardt praised the new marketing in a longer Instagram post in mid-June, but also complained that Walkenhorst put women at a disadvantage because they hardly played on center court and therefore also in the stream, and complained about Walkenhorst’s sometimes hearty choice of words. Most recently, he polarized again in his podcast, where he said, for example, that Ahmann and Hildebrand “hate” each other.
Ahmann says: “Hate is complete nonsense, I can’t get used to his polemics. But Alexander also does a lot of things right. He saved the German tour, and you can’t give him enough credit for that.” However, Walkenhorst Stand is now only the savior for one summer. Because on July 18, the DVV announced that the talks with Spontent GmbH about the alignment from 2023 had failed: “The ideas of both sides were too far apart, which made a consensus impossible.”