Gleed and van Rensburg, Bunton and Harsum are final British men in Queen & King of the Court Showcase

They will take their place in the line-up of international stars and homegrown talent for the event staged in the iconic setting of Canada Square, Canary Wharf, which is free for spectators to attend (no ticket required). 

Gleed, 24, has achieved three top-five finishes at Beach Pro Tour Futures events at Lecca, Italy, Cortegaca, Portugal and Spiez, Switzerland. 

Born in Basel, Switzerland, he has lived the majority of his life in Bournemouth, where he also trains, in between occasional training camps in Florida. 

Playing with AS Finnish national, Gleed has won a Finnish National tour event this summer, but has also struck up his partnership with van Rensburg, 29, competing in the UKBT events together and taking third at the UK National Championships. 

Born in Durban, South Africa, van Rensburg now lives in Crystal Palace and trains there alongside two other players confirmed for the QKOTC London Showcase, Freddie Bialokoz and Issa Batrane.  

Alongside Gleed, he has also claimed second place in the London Open and third at the Bournemouth Grand Slam this season and is familiar with the surroundings of Canary Wharf, having won last year’s SideOut Finals hosted there. 

Talented teenagers Bunton, 16, from Brighton, and Harsum, 17, from East Dulwich, London, are one of the most promising English junior pairings on the circuit, as underlined by their encouraging results in 2024. 

They won the NEVZA Youth Beach Championships 2024 in the U18 category at Bridlington in June, dropping just one set throughout the tournament and beating Norway’s Mathias Smørholm and David Stenberg in straight sets in the final. 

The pair backed this up after being selected to represent England at the CEV European Championships in Kachreti, Georgia in July, becoming the country’s first boys team since Javier and Joaquin Bello in 2017 to reach the quarter-finals of the event. 

The newly-announced pairings will join the British men already confirmed for the London showcase – the Bello brothers, Bialokoz and Batrane and Enrique Bello and Josue Seekings. 

The British-based women who will play in the tournament were unveiled in full earlier this week as Anaya Evans and Katie Keefe, Kirsty Star and Alice Jagielska, Jess Grimson and Molly Quinn, Katie Barbour and Rachel Morrison and SideOut guest pair Aga Adamek and Eszter Nagy. 

International players in the women’s section signed up to play are Marie-Sára Štochlová (Czechia) and Sunniva Helland-Hansen (Norway), Lithuanians Ieva Dumbauskaite and Gerda Grudzinskaite, New Zealanders Alice Zeimann and Olivia MacDonald and Tjaša Kotnik (Slovenia) and Leona Kernen (Switzerland). 

They will be joined in the men’s section by Mees Sengers (The Netherlands) and Tim Brewster (USA), Austrians Felix Friedl and Alexander Huber, Estonians Mart Tiisaar and Dmitri Korotkov and Americans Hagen Smith and Logan Webber. 

Just one more international pair of each gender remain to be announced, so follow the Volleyball England website and social media to discover who that will be. 

Overall, there will be 20 teams (10 women, 10 men) who will play at Canary Wharf.