Qualifying for the 2017 FIVB World Championships via the European continental qualifying rounds, Koekelkoren and van Walle are only the fourth men’s team from Belgium to compete in the world finals with the previous three appearances being at the 1999 event in Marseille (France) where each team failed to qualify for the Main Draw. Van Walle started playing on the World Tour in 2010 with Koekelkoren’s first FIVB event being in 2013. The team’s best FIVB World Tour finishes are fifths at a 2016 stop in Turkey (Antalya) and 2017 in China (Xiamen). In a 2017 European tour event in Austria, Koekelkoren and van Walle became the first men’s team from Belgium to win a CEV title.