Brandie Wilkerson and Melissa Humana-Paredes will leave the Ostrava Elite16 beach volleyball tournament with bronze medals.
The Canadians defeated Swiss duo Nina Brunner and Tanja Hüberli in consecutive sets (21-16, 21-14) in Sunday’s third-place match at the Czech Republic tournament.
“I think with this game we went in with the mentality of leaving it all out on the court,” said Humana-Paredes. “It’s been a long week, so we wanted to put everything we could into it, and I think we did. We came out with the result we wanted [from this match].”
Ostrava marked just the third event for Wilkerson and Humana-Paredes, both of Toronto, since joining forces full-time in October.
The Canadians were unbeaten at the tourney until dropping their semifinal match to Terese Cannon and Sarah Sponcil of the United States (19-21, 23-21, 15-13) earlier Sunday.
Cannon and Sponcil were later defeated by Brazil’s Ana Patricia/ and Duda 21-17, 14-21, 12-15 in the women’s gold-medal match.
“The teams here are elite calibre, but we’ve been working very hard,” Wilkerson said in a post-match interview. “We have an amazing team [and] an amazing coach, so every game we were focused and we had our eye on the prize. “This is amazing, to come from the qualifier to a medal, but there’s still a couple spots at the top that we want to reach [on the podium] so there’s a lot of work to be done.”
