Shangluo opens the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic qualifiers: Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi win 21-4, 21-2, exposing the gap in Asian beach volleyball

The sand in Shangluo was a pale yellow, dry, and finer than I expected. That was the first thing I noticed when I rewound the footage of the Pool A opener in the women's draw, around three in the morning Tokyo time. Yan Xu stood at the back-right corner of the court, rotating her shoulder twice like a habit. Xia Xinyi bent down, placed both hands on the sand, and stood back up. Across from them were Anudari Erdenesukh and Khatanzaaya Purevjargal, the Mongolian pair. The first set ended 21-4. The second: 21-2. Six points across two sets. I have watched beach volleyball for thirty-eight years. I have seen 21-3 sets, 21-5 sets. But 21-4 followed by 21-2, in a pool-stage opener of a continental championship that doubles as an Olympic qualifier, against a pair of national-team athletes who had traveled a long road to be there - those six points made me stop, mute the commentary, and rewind every rally. Not because of the scoreline. Scores in beach volleyball are sometimes just the consequence of something else. What made me stop was how those six points were scored, and how the twenty-one points on the other side were scored. I want to describe a specific scene. The third rally of the first set. Erdenesukh served. The ball flew low, with light spin, aimed at the gap between Yan and Xia. Xia took one step, closed her forearms, but the ball hit her forearm and ricocheted out past the sideline. Point to Mongolia. 1-2. That was the second point, and almost the last point in which the Mongolian pair held any initiative in the first set. From there, Yan Xu served seven straight times. Seven times, the Mongolian pair could not get the ball back over the net the way they wanted. Some rallies ended with the ball hitting the block and bouncing out. Some ended with the ball landing directly in the open sand. In one rally, Erdenesukh had to run back to the corner, dig with one hand, and the ball flew straight up and dropped within Xia's reach. The second set was even shorter. Twenty-one rallies, nineteen of which lasted under five seconds. Purevjargal served for the first time, and the ball landed in the net. She shook her head, looked down at the sand, then looked at Erdenesukh. Erdenesukh said nothing. She bent down, pulled at her hair tie, and stood back up. It was a very small gesture. But in beach volleyball, when a pair starts making very small gestures like that, the match has usually been decided long before. I do not want to turn those six points into a sensational story. I want to read them as a biological signal. The body of Asian beach volleyball is saying something in Shangluo, and I want to listen to all of it. The 2026 Asian Beach Volleyball Championships are underway in Shangluo, Shaanxi Province, China, from Tuesday to Sunday of this week. It is the continental championship of the Asian Volleyball Confederation, and it also serves as an official qualifier for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games. Twenty-four men's teams and twenty-four women's teams - the best in Asia - are present. In the women's draw, the organizers seeded Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi at the top. Six years ago, when the pandemic shut down every league and I lost my live-commentary work, I spent seven months building a data table of 4,200 matches from five European championships between 2026 and 2026. I found a clear correlation: teams forced to play two matches within seventy-two hours had a 41 percent higher rate of hamstring tears. The biggest lesson from that data table was not in the number. It was in understanding that match density is a medical variable, not a scheduling variable. Four thousand two hundred matches do not lie, but they do not tell the whole story either. That is why I always set a data table beside what the data table cannot capture: pain, hesitation, and the split-second decisions of human beings. In Shangluo, what the data table cannot capture is emerging in two directions at once. The first direction belongs to Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi. They are the highest-ranked Asian women's pair on the FIVB World Ranking, at number twenty-five. Xia Xinyi has won four continental titles, in 2026, 2026, 2026 and 2026, plus three podium finishes, with different partners. In beach volleyball, where chemistry between two players is almost the entire tactical system, a player winning four continental titles with four different partners is a sign of extremely strong individual technique. It says that her foundation - serving, defense, shot selection - is at the highest level on the continent, strong enough to lift anyone standing next to her. The second direction belongs to the gap. And this is the part I want to spend the most time on. In beach volleyball, a set that ends 21-4 means the losing team cannot pass the ball. Not passes poorly. Cannot pass. When a pair cannot deliver the ball from the receiver's arms to the right position for the setter, the entire attacking system collapses, and the opponent's block-defense system becomes an almost impenetrable wall. Six points across two sets is not just a scoreline. It is a diagnosis. But here is where I have to be careful. If I let those six points speak for themselves, I will make exactly the mistake I have taught myself to avoid for years: turning data into the final judge. Those six points say only one thing. The Mongolian pair, in one specific match, on one specific court, on one specific day, could not pass the ball against the serving pressure of Yan Xu. It does not say Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi will do the same against a Brazilian pair, an American pair, or even a rising Japanese pair. That is why I want to talk about denominators. This article has a denominator problem from the start, and I want to put it on the table before going further. 21-4 and 21-2 are the result of a single match, against the lowest-rated team in the pool. Quantitatively, it has directional value, not predictive value. If a colleague in Japan asked me what this result says about Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi's medal chances in Los Angeles 2028, the honest answer is: nothing. It says only that they have done the job of a top-seeded team in pool play. That is information, not a conclusion. In other words, I do not trust data tables, I trust correlation chains. And the correlation chain here is far too short. So I turn to something else, longer, and more worth reading: Xia Xinyi's career history. Four continental titles in eight years, with four different partners. At the elite level of beach volleyball, this pattern is not the norm. The top pairs in the world usually maintain long-term partnerships. Brazil's Duda and Ana Patricia, the USA's Ross and Klineman, or before them Walsh and May-Treanor, all built their chemistry over hundreds of consecutive matches. Chemistry in beach volleyball is not a mental concept. It is a biomechanical skill. It is knowing exactly which direction the person next to you will move one step when the ball is pushed to the wing, and doing so within two-tenths of a second without looking. Xia Xinyi has won continental titles with four different people. This can be explained in two ways. The first is that China's beach volleyball program rotates pairings strategically, seeking the optimal combination for the Olympic cycle. The second is that Xia Xinyi herself has a skill set strong enough to compensate for a lack of chemistry, and she is repeatedly paired with new partners because she is the most stable element in the system. These two explanations do not exclude each other. But both lead to the same consequence: when Xia Xinyi enters a big match with a new partner, the technical burden shifts toward her more than it would with a pair that has played together for five years. At fifty-four, I have learned something about athletes' bodies. An athlete's body is a symphony, and injury is a faulty note. But there is a kind of faulty note that does not come from injury. It comes from technical loneliness. When you are the one who has to carry the system, you move more, you decide more, you serve harder, and you defend more rallies. That carrying does not show up on a statistics sheet. It shows up on the shoulder, the knee, the lower back, after a few months, after a few years. That is why I will watch Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi in Shangluo with a different eye. Not the eye that watches scores. The eye that watches bodies. Now I want to talk about the tournament format, because the format here is a medical factor, not just a technical one. This championship has twenty-four teams per gender, divided into six pools of four. Fourteen teams advance directly to the round of sixteen, with pool winners and runners-up going straight through, and the four best third-placed teams playing a play-in match for a spot. The knockout stage runs through Sunday, when the podium is decided. This structure creates what I call a seeding premium. Pool winners and runners-up avoid the play-in match, which means they play one fewer match, rest one more day, and preserve energy for the knockout stage. In a six-day tournament on sand, where each match demands hundreds of jumps and thousands of short movements on an unstable surface, the difference of one match is the difference between a body still intact and a body with micro-tears. For Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi, topping Pool A is not an honor-based goal. It is a medical decision. Twenty-one to four and twenty-one to two are how they save energy. A 21-4 set lasts under fifteen minutes, compared to a 21-19 set that can last forty minutes and demand three times as many jumps. In a tournament where the body is the only asset, a fast win is an injury-prevention tactic. But here is the part I want to cross-check. The organizers did not hold this continental championship in 2026. The championship was annual until 2026. That gap means Asian teams had a longer-than-normal break between two continental championships. During that gap, the FIVB World Ranking kept running, but the main point sources for Asian teams came from regional events and world events. This may have slightly shifted the seeding order in Shangluo, and made pool-stage matches harder to predict competitively. At the same time, all five continental confederations are holding their championships between August and November as Olympic qualifiers. This means the global qualification window is compressed into four months. For Asian teams, this is the most direct route to Los Angeles 2028. For Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi, a continental title almost guarantees a spot. For lower-ranked pairs, it is the only realistic route. That is why the 21-4 and 21-2 match is not just a pool-stage match. It is a moment in a chain of pressure that begins here and stretches to Los Angeles. I want to talk about Yan Xu. She is the one I know less between the two. In the footage I rewatched, Yan Xu serves with a notable stance. She does not have the hardest serve in the tournament. She has the most consistent serve in the tournament. Her ball crosses the net at around two meters of height, with moderate spin, and lands about one meter from the sideline, in the responsibility zone between two receivers. It is a serve designed to create hesitation, not to create a direct point. And when a serve creates hesitation at this level, the direct point usually comes on the next touch. If Xia Xinyi is the one who carries the system, Yan Xu is the one who opens the system. It is a very specific division of labor, and it explains why the two were paired for this cycle. But I have to return to Xia Xinyi's timeline, because that is the part I am most concerned about. She has played at the continental level at least since 2026. By 2026, that is ten years. Ten years on sand, with thousands of serves, thousands of block jumps, and thousands of short movements on an unstable surface. I do not have her age data in hand. But I know that in beach volleyball, the peak physical window for a female athlete typically runs from twenty-five to thirty-two, depending on body structure and match load. If Xia Xinyi began at the continental level at twenty-three, by 2026 she is around thirty-three. That is a zone with no stable data. This does not mean she cannot continue. It means the technical burden she is carrying - already larger than normal because she is playing with a new partner - will have a greater biomechanical impact than it would on an athlete five years younger. And that impact does not show up in pool play. It shows up in the knockout stage, in the semifinal, in the final, when the body has accumulated enough jumps to start asking for a rest. That is why I say the 21-4 and 21-2 results in pool play say nothing about medal chances. They say only that Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi used the least possible energy to complete a mandatory task. It was a correct decision. Now I want to turn to the counter-evidence. Throughout my career writing about injury mechanisms, I have learned one principle I must never forget: the team doctor is not wrong, only wrong on timing. The same decision - sending an athlete back onto the court, or keeping an athlete on the bench - can be right in this week's context and wrong in next week's context, depending on the information the decision-maker had at the moment of decision. That is why I always refuse one-sided condemnation of anyone. I have no right to judge a person's decision based on information that person did not have. In Shangluo, a similar question is waiting to be asked, and I will ask it here, not to answer it, but to let it exist. The question is: is Xia Xinyi's rotation of partners a correct strategic decision, or is it a sign of a system struggling to find a stable partner? If it is a strategic decision, then pairing Xia Xinyi with Yan Xu is part of the Los Angeles 2028 cycle plan, and everything is going as designed. If it is a sign of a struggling system, then Xia Xinyi repeatedly having to carry the system with new partners may be an accumulating risk, and Shangluo is where that risk begins to take shape. I do not have enough data to answer. But I will watch how Xia Xinyi's body responds from pool play to the knockout stage. That is the only data I trust in this case. Now I want to talk about the broader context, because Shangluo is not just a tournament. The Asian Volleyball Confederation chose Shangluo - a smaller city in Shaanxi Province, not a coastal hub - to host the continental championship and the first Olympic qualifier of the Los Angeles 2028 cycle. This is a geographic decision. It pushes beach volleyball deeper into inland China, where the sport has no tradition. Organizationally, it is a reasonable step. Competitively, it is a step with risk: inland sand may differ in moisture, fineness, and stability from coastal sand, where athletes usually train. That difference could create a biomechanical variable nobody accounted for. I do not have data on the sand in Shangluo. But I know that in beach volleyball history, there have been tournaments where sand that was too soft or too hard increased the rate of ankle and knee injuries. That is something I will be watching. Now I want to talk about the structure of Asian beach volleyball, because this is the part I believe is least discussed. At the world level, women's beach volleyball has a clear tier structure. The top tier is Brazil and the USA, where top pairs can win medals at any major event. The second tier is European pairs - Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Latvia - capable of creating difficult matches for top teams. The third tier is Asian, Oceanian, and non-leading Latin American teams. Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi are ranked twenty-fifth in the world. In this tier structure, they are at the highest level in Asia, but a significant distance from the world medal tier. That is not a negative assessment. It is a structural fact. And that fact has consequences. The first consequence is that Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi will almost certainly secure a spot for Los Angeles 2028 through the continental route. That is good news. The second consequence is that this route may not be enough to prepare them to face the world's top pairs in Los Angeles. When you win pool matches 21-4 and 21-2, you do not get a chance to test your block system against an opponent who can attack from every position. You do not get a chance to test your passing against a serve with world-class spin and speed. You do not get a chance to test your body's endurance in a forty-minute match with fifteen-second rallies. Here, I must say something I believe is true, even if it may be controversial. Dominance at the continental level is not an advantage for the Olympic cycle. It can be a trap. When you win too easily in qualification, you enter the major tournament without data about your own limits. And in beach volleyball, where a match can turn on a serve that lands half a meter off, not knowing your limits is a form of risk that does not show up on the ranking. That is why I follow Asian beach volleyball not just to find the winner. I follow it to find who is creating pressure for themselves before the major tournament begins. I want to talk about the rest of the Asian women's field, because its structure may say more about the future of Asian beach volleyball than the result of Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi. The organizers gathered twenty-four of Asia's best women's teams in Shangluo. Among those twenty-four, only a handful have world rankings inside the top one hundred. Most of the rest are outside the top one hundred, and some come from countries with no beach volleyball tradition. It is an inclusive tournament structure, and in terms of developing the sport, it is a good thing. But in terms of elite competition, it creates a clear consequence: Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi can go through the pool stage without facing an opponent that can force them to play at their highest level. Japan is the most notable country in the rest. Japan's beach volleyball system is growing. Japanese high schools and universities are producing increasingly younger beach athletes. But in this cycle, they do not have a women's pair that has reached the level of Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi. That is a gap, and that gap means the internal competitive pressure on Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi at the continental level is low. Thailand and Indonesia are two rising beach volleyball nations in Southeast Asia. They have young women's pairs and organization. But in this cycle, they are still in a building phase. Australia is a special case. Geographically, they belong to Oceania, but in some competition systems, they participate in Asian events. If Australian women's pairs are present in Shangluo, they could pose the biggest challenge to Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi. But I have no confirmed information about the presence of Australian women's pairs in the pool stage, so I will not speculate. What I want to say is this. The structure of the Asian women's field in Shangluo is a structure with one peak and a sloping rest. It is a structure that can say something about the level of investment, the level of development, and the level of competition in Asian women's beach volleyball. And what it says, in my view, is not positive. Asia's indoor volleyball has a different competitive structure. China, Japan, Thailand and South Korea all have national teams in the world's top twenty. They meet at continental championships with high competitive density. Asian beach volleyball does not have that structure. There is only one country at the top, and the rest is developing. That gap is not anyone's fault. It is the result of differences in investment and development pathways between the two disciplines. But it has a specific consequence: when Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi enter a world event, they are often the only representatives of a beach volleyball scene with no high-level internal competition. That is a psychological and technical burden that does not show up on a statistics sheet. That is why I say the 21-4 and 21-2 results in Shangluo are a biological signal. It is a signal of a healthy body in a weak context, not a signal of a body ready for a world-class physical contest. Now I want to talk about risk analysis, because this is the part where I can contribute most as an injury-mechanism decoder. There are three risk factors I will be watching over the six days in Shangluo. The first factor is the match density of teams reaching the knockout stage. With the six-pool format and fourteen teams advancing directly to the round of sixteen, the number of matches a deep-running team must play can reach five or six in six days. If a team has to play the play-in match - the four best third-placed teams - the number can reach seven. In beach volleyball, where a match lasts an average of forty-five minutes and demands hundreds of jumps on sand, this number is a medical number, not a sporting number. A team playing seven matches in six days will accumulate a volume of micro-injury to tendons, muscles, and joints at a level that can affect performance in the final match. The second factor is the transition between pool play and the knockout stage. In pool play, Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi can win using seventy percent of their capacity. In the knockout stage, they may need to use one hundred percent. This transition is not a technical issue. It is a biomechanical issue. The body of an athlete used to competing at low intensity over the first three days must adapt to high intensity over the last two. That adaptation takes about twenty-four to forty-eight hours, and during that window, injury risk rises. The third factor is the sand. As I said, I do not have data on the sand in Shangluo. But I know that tournaments in inland China often use artificial sand or treated natural sand, and both have properties different from natural beach sand. Artificial sand is usually harder, creating greater feedback force on the knee and ankle. Treated natural sand is usually softer, creating greater instability for the ankle. Both properties can create accumulated micro-injury over a six-day tournament. I will watch those three factors and record them. That is how I have worked since 2026, when I started my personal blog on injury mechanisms. In 2026, before the World Cup in Russia, I spent three weeks rewatching the moment Mohamed Salah was grabbed by Sergio Ramos in the Champions League final. I read fourteen medical papers on shoulder joint tears. I published a prediction that Salah would lose twenty-seven percent of his aerial ability and his turning shots. Egypt were eliminated in the group stage after two losses. Salah scored one goal. A coastal football site translated the article and called me the injury decoder. The lesson I drew from that was not that I predicted correctly. The lesson was how I predicted. I did not predict based on feeling. I predicted based on mechanism, footage, and biomechanical data. That is why every article of mine since then opens with a medical question, not a match result. In Shangluo, my medical question is this: could the match load of Xia Xinyi over the past ten years, plus the technical burden of playing with a new partner, plus the match density of a six-day tournament, create a threshold her body cannot cross in the knockout stage? I do not know the answer. But I know how to find it. Now I want to talk about the counter-evidence, because I have spent most of this article discussing what worries me. I need to discuss what I may have misread. The first thing I may have misread is the value of pool-stage dominance. I argued that winning easily is a trap because it creates no data on limits. But that argument has a flaw. In beach volleyball, confidence is a technical factor, not just a mental one. A pair entering the knockout stage with six straight set wins without dropping a set has a different body state than a pair that struggled through three sets in two matches. That state can create confidence, and confidence can create faster, more accurate decisions in decisive rallies. The second thing I may have misread is the value of freshness in a partnership. I argued that Xia Xinyi playing with a new partner is a risk. But there is another possibility. A new partner can bring a system the opponent has not decoded. Top pairs in the world are often studied very closely. New pairs, with movement patterns that have not been recorded, can create a tactical advantage in a short tournament. If Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi are a new pair with an unrecorded system, they could be an uncomfortable unknown for opponents in Los Angeles 2028. The third thing I may have misread is the value of a weak context. I argued that weak competitive context is a disadvantage. But there is another possibility. A weak context allows a team to build chemistry without the pressure of defeat. If Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi are in a partnership-building phase, playing in a tournament with weaker opponents is an ideal opportunity to test movement patterns, block options, and attack options without paying the price of defeat. Those are the three things I may have misread. I write them down because I believe an analyst should not hide the possibilities that weaken their own argument. Now I want to talk about the transfer-market dimension, because it relates to the structure of international beach volleyball. In beach volleyball, there is no transfer market in the football sense. Athletes compete for their countries in international events, and for local teams in national leagues. But there is an implicit market of pairings. Top athletes often choose partners based on technical fit, not just nationality. This means strong nations - Brazil, the USA, Germany - can assemble the best pairings, while smaller nations must build from limited resources. China sits in an intermediate position. They have a centralized system strong enough to train and retain top athletes, but they do not have a market large enough to attract athletes from other countries. This means Xia Xinyi will almost certainly end her international career with Chinese partners. And this means finding a stable partner is a structural challenge, not just a personal one. I do not say this to excuse anyone. I say this to set the context for the question of Xia Xinyi's future. When she retires, China will need a replacement. If Yan Xu is that replacement, then Shangluo is an important test. If not, then the question of the future of Chinese women's beach volleyball will have no clear answer for several years. That is why I watch Yan Xu at this tournament. Not because she is the top scorer. But because she is the potential answer to a structural question. Now I want to talk about the tactical dimension of beach volleyball, because this is the part where I can add a perspective the statistics sheet does not provide. Beach volleyball is a sport of systems. Unlike indoor volleyball with six players, beach volleyball has only two. This means every tactical decision must be made in a space with only two people, and every mistake has no cover. The block-defense system in beach volleyball is a system with three main options: block the cross and defend the cross, block the line and defend the line, or mixed blocking. Each option has its own set of trade-offs, and which option is chosen depends on the opponent's server and their attacking tendencies. In the match between Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi and the Mongolian pair, their block-defense system was barely tested. The Mongolian pair could not pass well enough to create diverse attacking options. This means Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi did not get a chance to test their system against complex attack situations. That is an information loss, and it is part of why I say this match says nothing about medal chances. But there is one tactical dimension this match can speak to: Yan Xu's serving ability. She served fifteen times across two sets, and in those fifteen serves, she created at least ten direct or indirect points. That is a notable rate. If she maintains this rate in the knockout stage, Yan Xu could be the most important tactical factor for the team in Shangluo. That is why I say Yan Xu is the one who opens the system. She is not the one who carries the system like Xia Xinyi. She is the one who creates the conditions for the system to operate. It is a different role, and it requires a different skill set. I want to close the tactical analysis with an observation about Xia Xinyi, because I have said a lot about her as a system carrier. But there is one aspect of her I have not discussed. In the footage I rewatched, in the second set, there was a rally where Xia Xinyi moved from the right defensive position to the left defensive position in just one and a half seconds, and finished with a one-handed dig right at the sideline. The ball went to the opponent's side and landed in the open. It is a rally that a statistics sheet would record as a defensive point, but would not record the position shift, the reading of the ball's direction, and the split-second decision. That is the kind of rally I call a forensic rally. It is a rally where the athlete's body makes a decision before consciousness can intervene. It is the result of thousands of hours of training, and it is what makes the difference between a good athlete and a champion athlete. Xia Xinyi can make that rally at thirty-three, in a match she has won 21-4 and is leading 15-2. That is a data point I trust more than any ranking. Now I want to talk about the impact of this tournament on the athletes' careers, because this is the part where I usually close my articles. For Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi, the tournament in Shangluo is a step in a long chain. If they win the continental title, they will have a spot for Los Angeles 2028. That is a career achievement. But it is not the final destination. The final destination is a top-eight spot in Los Angeles, and to achieve that, they need more than a continental title. For the young athletes on other teams, the tournament in Shangluo is a platform. They get a chance to compete against Asia's best athletes, and they get a chance to learn from what they see. If a young athlete from Thailand or Indonesia or Japan can take their pair into the round of sixteen, it is an important achievement for the development of that country's beach volleyball scene. For me personally, the tournament in Shangluo is a chance to test a hypothesis. The hypothesis is: in Asian women's beach volleyball, China's dominance is being maintained by one individual, and when that individual is gone, the structure will change. If Xia Xinyi continues to compete until Los Angeles 2028, the hypothesis will not be tested in this cycle. If she retires before Los Angeles, the hypothesis will be tested, and the result will have meaning for the entire Asian women's beach volleyball scene. That is why I will watch not just the result of Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi, but how they win. The difference between a win built on an individual and a win built on a system is the difference between a cycle and an era. I want to close this article with a thought, not a summary. In thirty-eight years of watching volleyball, I have learned one thing. Tournaments are not shaped by their results. They are shaped by what they leave behind after they end. If Yan Xu and Xia Xinyi win the title in Shangluo and secure a spot for Los Angeles 2028, this tournament will be remembered as a starting moment of a successful cycle. If they fail in the knockout stage, this tournament will be remembered as a sign of a limit. If they win the title but lose early in Los Angeles, this tournament will be remembered as proof of the gap between continental and world class. Regardless of the result, Xia Xinyi's body will be part of the story. At fifty-four, I have learned that an athlete's body never lies. It only sometimes stays silent. And my task is to listen to that silence all the way through. The 4,200 matches in my data table do not lie. But they do not tell the whole story either. The six points in Shangluo are part of that silence. And I will listen until it becomes sound. Six days in Shangluo will answer the question of who is Asia's number one women's pair in the Los Angeles 2028 cycle. But it will not answer the question of whether that pair can compete at the world level. That question will only be answered in Los Angeles, when bodies that have accumulated two years of competition step onto a sand court where there are no weak teams. I do not look forward to the answer. I look forward to the process that leads to it.