How Norway’s Beach Volley Vikings are changing beach volleyball

HERMOSA BEACH, California — In the spring of 2015, Mathias Berntsen and Anders Mol, cousins united by blood as much by a hereditary passion for the sport of volleyball, sat down and mapped out the future.

There was much to discuss.

The members of Norway’s senior national team at the time were aging out. After the 2016 Olympic Games, the future of their country’s success would fall on the shoulders of a handful of unproven teenagers, in a federation with little infrastructure and a resume not long with success.

“We sat down and said we have to do something,” Berntsen said. “We didn’t have a system so we said we have to do it ourselves. What can we bring to the world that makes it cool to watch the brand? We sat down and discussed everything.”

Because they were still in high school, the first priority was, of course, the name. What should they call themselves? They tinkered with all things Norway — the fjords, the mountains, the country’s history. After a couple hours of kicking names back and forth, they settled on something a little more fitting for a mascot: vikings.

From here on out, Anders Mol, Mathias Berntsen and the rest of the fledgling Norwegian beach volleyball players would be Christened the Beach Volley Vikings.

A good name.

A strong name.

But it was also just a name. Matters little if there is no success to back it up, no reason to know that name in the first place. So once the matter of the moniker was settled, they turned to a more audacious topic, one that did not take several hours to decide: What did they want to accomplish?

Easy: A gold medal at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

“We set the goal in 2015. Me and Anders sat down and said one of us is going for gold in Tokyo,” Berntsen said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “We just said we need to do something ourselves here and we put all of our savings in, our parents put in a lot of money, we put it all on one card which was to make it to Tokyo. In five years’ time, we will have a team that was going to win the Olympics.”

It is easy to look back now and see it as borderline obvious. Anders and Christian Sorum have been the best team on the planet since 2018 and have a legitimate argument as one of the greatest of all time, even at just 26 and 28 years old, respectively.

But in 2015? Such ambitions were still the stuff of high school dreams — lofty, grandiose, drifting into the realm of…