Buddy Hammon and Clark Marshall win first Spikeball world title

Buddy Hammon and Clark Marshall made Assistive Touch the first true standard-bearer of roundnet by winning the inaugural Spikeball Roundnet World Championships in Belgium and then adding the Spikeball Tour Series Championship in October 2022. That second title mattered almost as much as the first: it turned a one-week triumph into a season-defining run and gave the sport its earliest canonical champions, the pair everyone has pointed to ever since when the conversation turns to greatness.

The International Roundnet Federation set the stage for that breakthrough when it announced the first official World Championship for September 8-11, 2022, at Park Molenheide in Belgium. Registration opened on February 17, 2022, and the first window was limited to National Governing Bodies, a structure that helped make the event look less like an exhibition and more like a real world-title competition. In a sport still sorting out its identity, that mattered. The federation built the championship around national representation and a unified international framework, giving Hammon and Marshall a title with legitimacy beyond one weekend’s result.

Assistive Touch’s place in roundnet history comes from what they won and when they won it. The first official Worlds arrived at the exact moment the sport was graduating from a fast-growing niche into a governed international competition. By taking that title and then following it with the Tour Series crown in October, Hammon and Marshall established a clean line from world champion to national champion, the kind of double that turns a team into the reference point for everyone who comes after.

The sport’s next major milestone only reinforced that status. The International Roundnet Federation described its 2024 event at Surrey Sports Park in Guildford, Great Britain, as the second official Roundnet World Championship, with the schedule running from August 28 to September 1, 2024. Finals games and selected streamed matches were played on turf while other games were played on grass, and the venue had already hosted major international sport, including the Women’s Lacrosse World Cup in 2017. The federation said the format evolved from lessons learned in Belgium, showing that the 2022 championship had become the template for what followed.

That is why Assistive Touch still stands out in roundnet memory. They did not just win first. They won first, then won again, at the moment the sport was deciding how to define its own hierarchy. In a game where the terms Spikeball and roundnet can still appear side by side, Hammon and Marshall became the pair attached to the sport’s first official world-title era, and that is the rare kind of timing that keeps a champion’s name alive.