THERE will be a festival of volleyball this weekend as the 34th RAF Careers Weymouth Beach Classic is held.

The Classic is now firmly established as the top beach volleyball event in Great Britain with more than 10 courts with the key action focused on centre court with free seating for up to 500 spectators.

The action begins tonight with the Battens Charity event for local businesses which will see 100s of people playing volleyball for the first time.

The main event, the England Tour, starts at 9am on Saturday morning and there will be early pool action on all the courts throughout the day.

The competition will continue throughout Saturday until approximately 7pm.

Play then starts again on Sunday at 9am with the quarter-finals, followed by the semi-finals and then the women’s final at 3pm and the men’s final straight afterwards.

In all, 48 teams will be competing in the main event comprising of the men and women’s beach volleyballers in Great Britain as well as teams from across Europe.

There will be a number of teams to look out for but in the men’s competition one team to watch will be 17-year-old brothers Jaquim and Javier Bello.

The brothers have just returned from the Bahamas where they won gold while representing England in the Youth Commonwealth Games.

They are also making waves in the adult volleyball world and recently won a British Tour event in Sandbanks.

Two other key men’s teams to watch for are Mark Garcia-Kidd playing with Matt Hunter and Issa Batrane teaming up with Ryan Poole, both these teams have been playing on the European Tour this summer but are coming back to England especially to play in Weymouth.

The women’s event looks to be wide open but last year’s winners Eva Holt and Katja Gless will be difficult to beat.

Also in the draw is Ellie Austin who has also recently returned from Bahamas and the Youth Commonwealth Games where she finished fifth. There could be an interesting match-up at some point in the weekend as Ellie’s mum Denise who has won the event eight times is competing again this time with ex-Olympian Mo Glover

On Friday, there will be a competition aimed at development of up-and-coming players from across the country.

This event will include many local teams taking part who have completed in the Weymouth ‘ Go Spike ‘ League throughout the summer.

With the standard of improving rapidly it is hoped that we may see a Weymouth-based winner in either the men’s or women’s event.

This competition starts at 2pm on Friday with the final expected at approximately 8pm.

At the same time many of the main hopefuls for the weekend will be training on the outside courts..