While most players from the northern hemisphere are preparing for the start of the all-new Volleyball World Beach Pro Tour by training at indoor facilities or travelling to warm places like Tenerife for camps and sparring practice, some of the players in the southern hemisphere, who are in the middle of their summer heat, get to play competitively, which is probably the best way to find their game rhythm ahead of the much anticipated start of the international season.

And that applies to Australians Nicole Laird and Phoebe Bell, who are set to represent their country at next month’s Tlaxcala Challenge in Mexico, the inaugural Beach Pro Tour event. Last weekend they both won medals at Mollymook Open, the second stop on the 2022 Australian Beach Volleyball Tour. But they both played with different partners. They even had to play against each other in one of the semifinals.

“We have just been attempting to find the right fit coming into a new cycle,” Rio 2016 Olympian Nikki Laird told Volleyball World. “Phoebe and I will be playing in the next national tour event together.”

Laird/Jessyka Ngauamo and Bell/Stefanie Fejes crossed paths in one of the semifinals in Mollymook. After two tight sets, Bell and Fejes celebrated with a 2-0 (21-19, 21-18) victory.

However, in a hard-fought gold medal match, they suffered a 2-1 (20-22, 21-15, 15-13) upset at the hands of the same opponents they had defeated in the final of the previous tour stop, Alisha Stevens and Caitlin Bettenay, and settled for Mollymook silver.

Laird and Ngauamo, on the other hand, recovered with a 2-0 (21-16, 21-19) shutout of Georgia Johnson and Jasmine Fleming in the third place game to join the podium with bronze.

Laird and Bell will join forces for the next stop on the Australian Tour, the national championships set to take place at Manly Beach from March 4 through 6. There they might get an opportunity to test themselves against Tokyo 2020 bronze medallists Taliqua Clancy and Mariafe Artacho, who have registered to play at the event, or New Zealand’s Tlaxcala representatives Shaunna Polley and Alice Zeimann, who have received an international wild card from the organisers.

“Nikki and I are playing together because we both have enough ranking points, we are very similar in out mindset and on the same page in our values, and we want to achieve similar things in our career. We want to go out there, compete hard, play with joy and freedom, and trust our abilities,” Bell told Volleyball World.

Tlaxcala will not be the first major world-level tournament Laird and Bell play together. Back in 2017, they claimed a Shepparton 1-star bronze on their World Tour debut as a pair and went on to participate in three more Tour events together, the Rio de Janeiro 4-star, the Moscow 3-star and the Hague 3-star. Their cooperation also resulted in a 2017 Asian Championship bronze.

Laird’s international prize collection also contains a 2014 FIVB U23 World Championship title and two Asian Championship podiums with Mariafe Artacho, a 2017 Sydney 2-star bronze with Louise Bawden and a 2019 Sydney 3-star gold with Becchara Palmer.

With Jessyka Ngauamo, Bell took one gold and two bronze medals on the 2018 World Tour and a 2019 Asian Championship bronze.

“It feels good to get back out there to compete. We are very excited to finally be able to get back on tour for our first event in Tlaxcala!” said Laird. “We have spent two years away from the Tour due to travel restrictions and now we have to start from the bottom with very few points. But we are keen for the challenge, and to test out where we are at against the rest of the world...”

“We are both very excited to come and play in Mexico,” added Bell. “We both have our goals, individually and as a team, but we also have a lot of perspective on our situations. We are extremely grateful for the ability to be able to travel and compete. A good result is a bonus. I trust the outcome will be positive with a mindset like this.”

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