This year’s Italian Snow Volleyball Championship had just one stop, the Finals in Kronplatz, and once again produced one of those images that explains on its own why the discipline still attracts curiosity: a court set up high in the mountains, more than two thousand meters above sea level, with 16 teams and 32 matches played against the backdrop of the Dolomites. In the women’s event, the team led by Slovakia’s Silvia Poszmikova, alongside Anna Dalmazzo, Giulia Toti, and Sofia Arcaini, took the title, while the men’s competition was won by the squad made up of Jakob Windish, Markus Groeber, and Theo Hanni.

But the real story goes well beyond that Italian tournament. Snow volleyball remains largely unfamiliar to much of the public, a version of the sport played on snow that brings beach volleyball into the mountains and has grown slowly but steadily across Europe and a handful of other markets. Its unusual nature is not only in the setting, but also in the way the players look: there is still no specific uniform for the discipline, so athletes usually compete wearing thermal layers under synthetic volleyball shirts and shorts, along with football boots to gain grip on the snow and avoid slipping. The Fédération Internationale de Volleyball -FIVB- itself sums up the concept as volleyball “any time, any place,” from the beach to the mountains and from summer to winter.

A pencil sketch that became reality in the Alps

Although there are much older recreational references, snow volleyball as a modern sports product began to take shape in 2008 in Wagrain-Kleinarl, in Austria. There, Martin Kaswurm, then 22, wanted to imagine a different kind of winter event, beyond skiing and snowboarding. One night at the Gipfelstadl restaurant, next to the Flying Mozart cable car station, he started turning over an idea that sounded almost improbable at the time: bringing beach volleyball players onto snow to compete on a court built at altitude. Years later, he would remember that moment with a line that captures the spirit of the whole story: “At the end of that night, something inside me lit up and told me: let’s try it, we have nothing to lose.”

That instinct became a project with very limited means and a great deal of persistence. Kaswurm even drew the layout of the center court by hand, with stands and a restaurant, and took that sketch from company to company until he had gathered around 50,000 euros in sponsorship. The first tournament was held on March 7, 2009. The weather was bitterly cold and only around 20 to 30 spectators showed up, most of them friends and family, but it did not feel like failure. “I didn’t get discouraged, because I could see the potential,” he later said. The second edition, in 2010, used the visuals from that debut to launch a more ambitious promotional push, and that was when it began to feel as though this Alpine curiosity might actually have a future.

From the CEV umbrella to the FIVB structure

The institutional step forward came a few years later. The Confédération Européenne de Volleyball -CEV- took over the organization of the Snow Volleyball European Tour from 2016, giving the sport a more recognizable structure and a continental calendar. In its early stages, it was played in a two-a-side format, but from the 2019 season onward the European circuit moved to three-a-side, the format in which it has continued to develop. The tour has relied on mountain venues and an open-entry system for teams registering through their national federations, with places allocated through ranking, host-country quota, and wild cards.

The FIVB gave the sport another important push when it recognized snow volleyball as one of its disciplines and launched the first Snow Volleyball World Tour in 2019. That inaugural event, again in Wagrain-Kleinarl, brought together teams from all five continents and confirmed the ambition to take the discipline beyond a strictly European framework. Kaswurm himself admitted then that what was happening had gone far beyond what they had imagined a decade earlier. “Ten years ago we had our vision and our dreams, but this is clearly beyond what we could have imagined,” he said at the time, when the project had already gone beyond 40 events including tournaments, exhibitions, and promotional stops.

Uneven growth, but a national base and the return of the World Tour

Its development has not been entirely linear. The pandemic and other setbacks interrupted the international circuit, but the sport remained alive through national tours, promotional events, and European activity. In 2023, the FIVB said that around 20 countries had been organizing national snow volleyball championships or national tours in recent seasons, and that six more countries had added new activities that same year. The federation also stressed that its objective is to raise awareness of the sport, work through youth programs, and encourage more continental confederations and national federations to take part in its growth.

That relaunch effort became visible again in 2025, when the FIVB Snow Volleyball World Tour returned for the first time since 2019 with a tournament in Erzurum Palandoken, in Türkiye, more than three thousand meters above sea level. Teams from France, Georgia, Iran, Italy, Ukraine, and the host nation competed there, while the European Tour continued to stage stops in places such as Bakuriani, Erzurum, and Prato Nevoso. In that context, the Italian final in Kronplatz was not just another Alpine curiosity, but another sign that snow volleyball still has a structure that may be small, but is real, with national activity, a European circuit, and an international strategy still trying to turn a sport unfamiliar to many into a recognizable discipline within volleyball.