According to Stefan Hübner, “Have you already been to SVG?” has become a classic way to open a conversation in Lüneburg. What surprises even a doer like the volleyball men’s coach, because just three or four years ago it was more like: “Oh, we have a Bundesliga team?” The club’s impressive rise to a social event in the heath town south of which has 78,000 inhabitants Hamburg has a lot to do with patience in building a powerful team – and with the boost from a new venue for the “Lüne-Hünen”.
These days, SVG Lüneburg has reached the peak of its success so far, as Hübner’s giants reached the European Cup final. And even though they were shown their limits in the first leg against Asseco Resovia Rzeszow (Poland) with a 3-0 defeat at home, Hübner is already extremely satisfied before the second leg this Tuesday (6 p.m.): “Just being in this final is a huge success “, he says.
In order to classify what has been achieved, it is worth taking a look at the history of the CEV Cup (second highest European competition). Only once before has a German team reached the final – the Berlin Recycling Volleys even won the title in the 2015/16 season.
The star is the coach
At that time, the Lüneburgers had just begun their slow upswing. In 2014 the club was promoted to the Bundesliga for the first time. From the start it was said: The star is the coach – even if this status didn’t seem important to him. Stefan Hübner was Germany’s volleyball player of the year four times around the turn of the millennium and can look back on 245 appearances for the national team.
In his heyday, the two-meter man played for five different Italian premier league teams and enjoyed the nomadic life in the promised land of volleyball. As a coach, however, it was important to him from the start not to take any more hiking trails. Continuity and growing structures were the goal when he settled in Lüneburg together with his wife Angelina Hübner, née Grün – who was volleyball player of the year nine times during her playing days and played 297 international matches. Angelina Hübner now coaches athletes from various disciplines; Stefan is considered a “better maker” in volleyball circles.
His squad includes three Canadian and three US players alongside half a dozen German players. A mixture that has proven itself: “They complement each other well,” says the 48-year-old about the mix of North American looseness and German structure. The team’s most striking figure is outside attacker Erik Röhrs, who scores with penetration and emotionality.
For Hübner it is clear that the 22-year-old will soon move to one of Europe’s top leagues: “You have no chance of keeping him” – but that is not a problem. The aim was to create a development location in Lüneburg “where the players can develop” – and that was successful.
Volleyball in the slaughterhouse
SVG is now playing in the Bundesliga for the tenth year, has reached the play-off semi-finals five times and the cup final three times – only one title has not yet been won. Which was also due to the cramped conditions. For many years, the club competed in the Gellersenhalle with a special permit, which could only accommodate 800 spectators and whose ceiling height of 7.80 meters sometimes limited lofty game ideas. In 2021, the move to the LKH Arena, which has a capacity of 3,200 spectators, followed. Culture and sport now flourish where the city’s slaughterhouse once stood.
Achim Dreis, Mannheim Published/Updated: Recommendations: 1 Achim Dreis, Mannheim Published/Updated: Recommendations: 4 Theo Stemmler Published/Updated: , Recommendations: 20
This season the volleyball players played in the Champions League for the first time. After placing third in the preliminary round, they continued their European adventure in the quarter-finals of the CEV Cup, where they knocked Arkas Izmir out of the competition with the German star attacker Georg Grozer in the “Golden Set”. For the people of Lüneburg, the game was a social event in which everyone who experienced it could proudly say: “We were at SVG.”