World Dodgeball confirms 2025 Beach World Cup in Florida

World Dodgeball locked in its 2025 Beach World Cup for April 3-6 at Island H2O Water Park in Kissimmee, Florida, and built the event around a format that looked less like a sideshow and more like a separate competitive lane. The entry list ran from Adult Female, Male and Mixed divisions to U21 Female and Male, plus U16 Mixed, a structure that gave beach dodgeball its own pathway for development rather than a one-off exhibition slot.

That separation matters because the beach version now carries its own rules identity. World Dodgeball’s rules-and-regulation page includes a dedicated 2025 Beach World Cup section, and a November 2024 Beach Dodgeball rules document described the discipline as an official new branch of the sport with notable rule changes from standard World Dodgeball Association 5-ball rules. In practical terms, that pushes the game toward different movement patterns, different spacing and a different athlete profile, with sand turning footwork and recovery into part of the tactical equation.

The event was framed for traveling national federation athletes, coaches, dignitaries and supporters, underscoring the level of international staging around it. Experience Kissimmee said the tournament would be the first of its kind in Kissimmee, draw more than 600 participants from over 15 countries and generate more than 1,000 room nights. Todd Andrus, senior director of marketing at Island H2O Water Park, said the park was honored to partner with Experience Kissimmee and excited to host competitors and guests, while Tyler Weyant of Experience Kissimmee said the destination was thinking outside the box by bringing a beach event to a city without a traditional beach.

The World Cup also fit into a wider governing-body timeline that gives the beach format more weight. World Dodgeball, established in 2013, said its first World Cup was in Manchester in 2016, followed by Madison Square Garden in New York in 2018 and Cairo in 2022. That progression, combined with the new beach rules and the age-group structure, showed a sport building parallel disciplines through the same international machinery that has carried the indoor game. World Dodgeball Federation materials point in the same direction, saying its updated rules framework was developed with athletes, referees, continental confederations, national federations and technical leaders, while the 2022 World Championships in Edmonton added cloth format and a new mixed division to reach six divisions overall.