Kristina Valjas and Jamie Broder are currently running a crowd funding campaign to help cover the costs of their 2014 season on The FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour.  We've spoken many times about how we, as a community need to step up and help our sport.

This is one of those times.

Flying to a different country to compete each week, food, rent and a coach's salary is only the beginning of the costs that our beach athletes have to pay up.  From their Pursuit campaign, here is their situation in their words:

The beach national team program has extremely limited funding. Some countries fully cover the costs for their athletes to travel and compete all over the world, unfortunately Canada is not one of those countries! We have had to make it work with what we’ve got, which is each other. We can be our each other’s therapists (Jamie spent almost an entire season taping Kristina’s ankle when she had severely sprained it), video technicians, and coaches on the warm up court. We’ve developed their own system for warming up for matches even though there is no coach to serve and help us prepare like other teams. The fact that we can be competitive on the international level given the adversity we have to deal with makes us even more certain we have what it takes to be the best!

Another issue we deal with being Canadian beach volleyball athletes are the cold winter months. This really cramps our training style! Our national team program has set up an indoor facility for us athletes to train when it’s too cold to hit the beach in Toronto. However, this is not an ideal set up for us. Not only is it cold, we are not exposed to any of the real elements of our sport, like the sun and wind, which make up a big part of the challenge of the game. We’re also pretty isolated, having no international training partners. We only have the same few Canadian teams, which are good teams! But in order to get to the next level, we need to be where all the top teams in the world are training.

Our limited funding is not enough to cover our costs of travel and living expenses. We want to be able to train and compete with the top teams in the world, which means spending time in a warmer training climate leading up to next year’s world tour season. In order to do this, we need your help!!

We’re asking you for support because we want to include you in our journey, share our successes and make you proud to be a part of making dreams come true. Our goal is to represent Canada in the 2015 PanAm Games in Toronto and the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. Your support in this endeavor would mean the world to us, not only because you’re enabling us to maximize our training, but also to know that you are behind us in our pursuit of excellence.

In return, we offer givebacks! Check out the list and see what you’d like to receive in return for sharing some love! Thank you!

Support our volleyball athletes.