Alix Klineman, Hailey Harward awarded wild card for World Championships

There will be a fifth USA women’s team at the World Championships this October.

Alix Klineman is officially back.

The entry list for the World Championships was released on Friday morning, and Klineman and Hailey Harward were awarded a wild card. They are currently seeded 41 in the 48-team tournament that will be held in Tlaxcala, Mexico, October 6-15, though those seedings will change prior to the actual event, taking into account points won and lost during the Paris Elite16 at the end of September.

They will join Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth (2), Kelly Cheng and Sara Hughes (3), Terese Cannon and Sarah Sponcil (12) and Betsi Flint and Julia Scoles (14) as a five-team American contingent. The news presents a significant change in the landscape of the Olympic race. Klineman is one of the most accomplished blockers of this generation, an indoor convert who, just two years after winning the AVP Rookie of the Year in 2017 was named the USAV Women’s Beach Player of the Year in 2019. In four years with April Ross, from 2018-2021, Klineman collected 12 AVP titles and six gold medals on the Beach Pro Tour, including the 2021 Olympic gold in Tokyo.

This past June, however, Klineman had her first child, Theo.

“Right now my priority is having a healthy pregnancy and doing everything I can to deliver a healthy baby, but if everything worked out perfectly and magically maybe there would be a chance to make a last-second run at the Olympics,” she said when she announced her pregnancy in January. “I’m still holding out hope for that but at the same time I don’t feel comfortable saying 100 percent I’m doing this because I don’t know how my body is going to react, I don’t know how I’m going to feel emotionally after everything so I just feel like I have to take it one step at a time.

“You just hear so much about how it changes your world and I’m sure it’ll change mine. It’s just something I’m going to have to wait and see. Initially we were hoping this would have happened a little bit earlier just to give me a bigger and better opportunity to come back for Paris but life has its own plans so we’re just happy to be expecting a boy and to become parents and all that.”

Thus far, everything has worked out as well as anyone could have hoped. Both Klineman and Theo are healthy, and she has been practicing on the beach for several…