Gabi Martins: Rio’s Rising Star on the Sand

Brazil has produced some of the greatest beach tennis players in the world, and the sport’s pipeline shows no sign of running dry. Gabriela Martins — known throughout the Brazilian beach tennis circuit simply as Gabi — is one of the more compelling young names to watch in the women’s game right now: a carioca athlete whose natural athleticism spans multiple disciplines and whose beach tennis development, guided from early adolescence by some of the sport’s most respected mentors, has been building steadily toward the international stage.

At 22 years old, with an ITF BT50 title already on her résumé and her sights firmly set on the world’s top 100, Gabi Martins is exactly the kind of athlete that Brazilian beach tennis is counting on to carry the sport forward.

Background and Early Life

Gabriela Martins was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro — a carioca through and through, in a city where sport is woven into daily life and the beach is never far away. Rio’s culture of outdoor athletics, from the famous beachside volleyball and football games of Ipanema and Copacabana to the running paths along the lagoon, creates a natural environment for multi-sport development, and Gabi has embraced that culture fully. Her social media presence — maintained at the Instagram handle @gabmartins.__ — reflects a genuinely athletic lifestyle: track running, indoor volleyball, and of course, beach tennis fill her feed, painting a picture of someone who came to sport broadly before focusing her competitive energy on the sand court.

The specific details of her childhood are not extensively documented, as is common for young developing athletes who have not yet reached the highest tiers of the international game. What is confirmed is that she began training in beach tennis around the age of 14 — an important developmental entry point in a sport where many of Brazil’s elite began even younger. That she arrived at the sport with enough natural ability to be immediately taken seriously by experienced coaches speaks to an athletic foundation that predated her formal training.

Finding Beach Tennis: The BASA Connection

Beach tennis in Brazil is not an informal pursuit. It is a deeply structured, fiercely competitive sport governed by the International Tennis Federation (ITF), with a tiered global circuit of sanctioned tournaments and a world ranking system that Brazilian women have historically dominated. For a young carioca with talent and ambition, finding the right training environment is essential — and Gabi found exactly that at BASA Beach Tennis in Rio de Janeiro.

BASA — founded by Samantha Barijan, the first Brazilian woman to reach world number one in the ITF rankings — is one of the most respected beach tennis academies in Brazil, operating through multiple locations across the country and running a methodology built around competitive development, not just recreational participation. Gabi’s coach at the Rio de Janeiro branch has been Claudia Joppert, BASA’s local coordinator, who has overseen her technical and personal development since her teenage years. That kind of long-term coaching relationship — a single mentor tracking an athlete through the years of growth that matter most — is one of the structural advantages Gabi has enjoyed, and it shows in the steady, consistent progression of her results.

Equally significant was her connection to Samantha Barijan herself. Barijan, who spent time training in Rio de Janeiro and became personally invested in Gabi’s development, served not just as a mentor figure but as an active partner on the court. It is a somewhat remarkable detail: one of the greatest beach tennis players Brazil has ever produced, a world champion and three-time Pan American champion with over 51 ITF titles to her name, willing to step onto the court as a doubles partner for a teenager she believed in. That mentorship — tangible, competitive, and results-oriented — accelerated Gabi’s development in ways that no training drill alone could replicate.

Early Competitive Career: Building Through BT10s

The ITF Beach Tennis World Tour operates on a tiered points system, with tournaments graded from BT10 at the entry level through BT50, BT100, BT200, and BT400 at the top. For developing athletes, the BT10 circuit is where careers are built — and it is where Gabi Martins began accumulating titles and ranking points as her game matured through her late teens.

By the time she was in her early twenties, Gabi had claimed three ITF BT10 titles, a clear marker of consistent performance at that level of competition. Two of those titles came alongside Samantha Barijan as her doubles partner — a symbolic gesture, as Barijan herself noted, of what a veteran can mean to a young player’s development. Sharing a title with the woman who helped build your game is not something every young athlete gets to experience, and those victories almost certainly shaped Gabi’s competitive confidence as much as they shaped her ranking.

A December 2023 account on Sportbuzz captured Barijan publicly praising the partnership after one of those BT10 victories, marking one of the first times Gabi’s name entered the Brazilian sports media in any meaningful way.

The Breakthrough: BT50 Title in Vitória (September 2025)

The step from BT10 to BT50 competition is a significant one. BT50 events attract stronger fields, distribute more ranking points, and represent a meaningful threshold in a player’s trajectory toward professional relevance. Winning at that level — not just competing, but winning — is the kind of result that changes how the circuit sees a player.

In September 2025, Gabi Martins cleared that threshold. Competing at a BT50 event in Vitória, Espírito Santo, alongside partner Sue Farias, she captured her first ITF BT50 title — the biggest of her career to that point. The final was not straightforward: the pair dropped the first set in a tiebreak to opponents Aquila Souza and Isabela Andrade before regrouping to win 6/7(8/6), 6/3, 10/3 in a match that demanded exactly the kind of mental resilience that separates developing players from genuine competitors.

Gabi’s reaction to the victory was characteristically reflective. In the aftermath, she described the win as “simply unforgettable,” noting that each match had represented not just effort and dedication but confirmation of her technical, physical, and mental evolution. “It was a mix of happiness, pride, and relief — the feeling that everything came together at the right moment,” she said. “This victory showed me I’m capable of going further, that I can trust myself and my game more. My goal is to keep evolving and dedicating myself increasingly to the sport I love.”

Her coach Claudia Joppert framed the result in the context of a longer journey: “Evolution leads to achievement. Gabriela remains firm in pursuit of her dream of being a professional athlete, and BASA is proud to be part of that development process.” Barijan, reflecting on the student she had helped shape, added: “Sharing the court with Gabi in her first titles was special. It’s gratifying to see this growth and to realize that the future of women’s beach tennis is in the hands of a generation of strong, determined girls. Gabi is an example of that transition and that new stage of the sport.”

The BT50 title was covered by Esporte News Mundo and republished by Terra, two of Brazil’s more prominent sports platforms — a sign that Gabi’s profile is beginning to reach beyond the beach tennis community proper and into the broader Brazilian sports media.

The Athlete Behind the Racket: Multi-Sport Identity

One of the more interesting aspects of Gabi Martins as an athlete is that she does not define herself exclusively through beach tennis. Her Instagram presence is unmistakably that of a multi-sport athlete: track running and indoor volleyball appear alongside her beach tennis content, reflecting what appears to be a genuine, ongoing engagement with athletic competition across disciplines rather than a narrowly specialized profile.

In Brazil’s athletic culture, this kind of cross-disciplinary engagement is not unusual at the developmental level — many of the country’s great athletes came to their primary sport after competing in multiple others. What is notable in Gabi’s case is that she maintains these parallel pursuits even as her beach tennis career becomes more seriously professional. The physical demands of track — cardiovascular conditioning, explosive speed, coordination — translate directly to beach tennis performance, particularly on the sand surface where movement efficiency is a critical competitive factor.

The volleyball connection likewise makes intuitive sense: beach tennis and beach volleyball share physical environments, demand similar overhead mechanics and reading of ball flight, and attract athletes from overlapping athletic backgrounds. Many of the technical attributes that make a strong beach volleyball player — lateral movement, jump timing, court awareness — apply directly to beach tennis, and the sand-court experience Gabi has accumulated across both sports almost certainly cross-pollinates in ways that are difficult to measure but tangible in practice.

Beach Tennis: The Sport Itself

For readers less familiar with beach tennis, a brief orientation is useful. Played on a sand court smaller than a traditional tennis court, beach tennis uses solid paddles (rather than strung rackets) and a depressurized tennis ball, with a net set at a height of 1.7 metres. The game is almost exclusively doubles — singles does exist at some levels, but the international circuit is dominated by doubles competition — and points are won in a single play with no second serve. The sport rewards quick reflexes, sand-adapted movement, powerful overhead smashes, and precise net play, and it rewards partnership chemistry between doubles pairs in ways that solo sports simply cannot.

Brazil and Italy have historically dominated the sport internationally, and it is deeply embedded in Brazilian beach culture, particularly in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The ITF’s global circuit gives the sport an international competitive infrastructure, and Brazilian women have historically produced multiple world-ranked players. The dream of reaching the ITF top 100 — which Gabi has explicitly stated as her near-term goal — is ambitious but achievable for a player at her trajectory, particularly given that she reached the BT50 level of titleholder status at just 21 years old.

Current Status and Rankings

As of early 2026, Gabi Martins holds an ITF Beach Tennis doubles profile under player code 800677860, registered with the Brazilian federation. The BT50 title from Vitória in September 2025, combined with her three prior BT10 titles, has established her in the ITF ranking system with a competitive points base. The specific numerical ranking fluctuates with the rolling points window, but the directional trend of her career is unmistakably upward.

She remains based in Rio de Janeiro, training within the BASA system under Claudia Joppert’s guidance. The BASA network — which now includes over fifteen locations across Brazil and has developed a formalized talent management arm called BASA Talent specifically designed to support its professional-level athletes on the global ITF circuit — provides structural support that many developing beach tennis players lack: coaching continuity, tournament planning, marketing support, and institutional credibility.

Social Media and Public Profile

Gabi Martins is active on Instagram at @gabmartins.__, where she has built an audience of approximately 29,000 followers — a meaningful presence for an athlete at her stage of career development, and one that reflects genuine interest in both her athletic content and her broader lifestyle. The account gives followers a window into training sessions across beach tennis, track, and volleyball, along with competition moments and the everyday texture of life as a young professional athlete in Rio de Janeiro.

No major commercial sponsorships have been publicly announced as of this writing, which is consistent with her career stage. As her ITF ranking climbs toward and potentially into the top 100, brand partnerships — particularly with the Brazilian beach sports brands that sponsor the country’s established beach tennis athletes — become an increasingly likely next step. The BASA network’s own commercial infrastructure, including its BASA Talent arm, positions her well for that transition when it comes.

Mentorship, Legacy, and What Comes Next

One of the more resonant threads in Gabi Martins’ story is the generational continuity it represents. Samantha Barijan — who officially retired from professional competition in early 2026, closing a career that included 51-plus ITF titles and Brazil’s first women’s world number one ranking — spent meaningful time in Gabi’s corner during exactly the developmental years when such mentorship matters most. The two BT10 titles they shared are not just results; they are the tangible record of a passing of the torch, a legend investing competition time and personal credibility in a player she believed had a future.

Barijan, in her public comments about Gabi, has consistently framed that investment as one she expects to pay returns: the future of women’s beach tennis in Brazil, she suggested, is in hands like Gabi’s. Given the structural seriousness with which Barijan approaches everything she touches — she is building a documentary, a franchise training network, and a new generation of Brazilian champions — that is not a casual endorsement.

For Gabi Martins, the next chapters involve doing what she has always done: competing, improving, and trusting the process that has brought her from a teenager on Rio’s sand courts to a BT50 champion with international ambitions. The ITF top 100 is her stated target. The trajectory of her results suggests it is within reach.

Gabi Martins can be followed on Instagram at @gabmartins.__ . Her ITF Beach Tennis profile is registered under player ID 800677860 on the ITF website. Beach tennis fans and newcomers alike can learn more about the sport through the International Tennis Federation’s beach tennis portal at itftennis.com.