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Last Saturday Prosecco Doc Imoco Conegliano won its sixth consecutive women’s volleyball championship, the seventh in its short history, which began in 2012. In recent years Conegliano, coached by Daniele Santarelli, has dominated Italian volleyball, winning fifteen consecutive national trophies : five championships, five Italian Cups and five Italian Super Cups. The last time another team won a title in Italy was on 3 February 2019, when Novara defeated Conegliano in the Italian Cup final.
From that moment, Conegliano has become almost unbeatable for its opponents. Between 2019 and 2021 they won seventy-six matches in a row in all competitions, beating Turkish team VakıfBank’s previous European record of seventy-three, while this season they have only lost two matches. In the Scudetto finals that have just concluded, Conegliano beat Scandicci by three games to one, after a very balanced and spectacular series. Now, to conclude another exceptional season, the Venetian team is missing the Champions League, the main European competition: on May 5th in Istanbul, Turkey, they will play in the final against another Italian team, Vero Volley Milano. Conegliano won it already in 2021, while in 2022 it lost in the final (last year it went out in the quarterfinals).
(ANSA/CLAUDIO GIOVANNINI)
Conegliano is a fairly small city in the province of Treviso, in Veneto, and has just over 34 thousand inhabitants. It may seem strange that a town of this kind is able to exercise such sporting dominance over teams from much larger cities, especially Milan and Rome, and above all for such a prolonged period of time. Most of the reasons, however, have a lot to do with the economy of the area in which Conegliano is located, at the beginning of the Prosecco hills: together with Valdobbiadene, it is in fact one of the two municipalities in the Treviso area in which the production of this product is concentrated very successful sparkling wine. In 2012 some local entrepreneurs decided to found a new volleyball team here, a few days after the failure of the previous one (Spes Conegliano). The new owners took over the title from Parma Volley Girls (essentially bought their place in the championship, a usual practice in volleyball), immediately enrolling in the A1 series. Surprisingly, that season Conegliano immediately reached the Scudetto finals, then losing to Piacenza.
The three families who contributed most to the birth and growth of the team are linked to the territory and the Prosecco supply chain. There are the Garbellottos, who have owned a company producing barrels and vats since 1775; the Maschios, owners of historic distelleries and cellars; and finally the Polos, owners of Imoco, the graphics company that creates the bottle labels and which has given the team its name from the beginning. This deep rooting in the place of ownership allowed the team to immediately have a large following. Despite playing their matches at the Palaverde in Villorba, near Treviso (about thirty kilometers from Conegliano), Imoco is always among the teams with the most spectators in Italian volleyball. This season, he wrote Monday there were an average of 4,700 spectators at home matches (the highest average in Serie A1), for a total of over 100 thousand attendances for the season.
– Read also: Nobody plays volleyball like Conegliano
In recent years, Conegliano, growing on a commercial level (today it has around 270 sponsors, almost all local) and renewing itself on a technical level, has continued to be the best Italian team: the club has always been able to manage changes very well. Of the sextet that won the Scudetto in 2018, only the Polish setter Joanna Wołosz and the libero Monica De Gennaro remain, two fundamental players. The others have changed, but have always been replaced as best they can, and the new arrivals were immediately inserted into a very high level gaming context.
For example, in the summer of 2022 the Italian Paola Egonu, one of the best players in the world, left Conegliano to move to Turkey. In her place, Conegliano took the opposite Isabelle Haak, who was decisive in these Scudetto finals (against Scandicci she scored 27 points in game 1, 34 in game 2, 41 in game 3 and 29 in game 4 ). American spiker Kathryn Plummer is expected to leave next year, but it might come the Chinese spiker Zhu Ting, who has just faced Conegliano in the Scudetto finals with Scandicci.
Isabelle Haak’s 41 points in game 3 against Scandicci
Daniele Santarelli, considered the best coach in women’s volleyball, was fundamental in fueling this cycle of victories. Season after season, Santarelli kept the team’s motivation high, always managing to get the most out of all the volleyball players. In the meantime, in addition to winning everything with Conegliano, he also won the 2022 World Cup as coach of Serbia and the 2023 European Championships as coach of Turkey. In volleyball it is quite common for a club coach to also be the coach of a national team at the same time and for this reason, many they hope that sooner or later Santarelli will also coach Italy.