Modena Volley: a 2024/2025 season without highlights and with doubts about the future

What will remain of these two seasons? Of these two groups, the first revolutionized and repudiated, that never really managed to find an identity, a compactness and, consequently, a result? Modena Volleyball closes the door of the 2024/2025 season once again anonymous, without any notable highlights, without having managed to concretize a good last month and a half of the season with the European qualification. Also giving the feeling of not being too convinced of who she will be, in 2025/2026, especially in the setter: a Luciano De Cecco confirmed by the two-year contract offered to him a year ago which the yellow and blues seemed to want to get rid of, without however having taken advantage of the transfer opportunity that arrived in December (Turkey) and clashing today with the legitimate and indisputable will of the player to see the signatures respected.

What will remain of this season? The backbone of the starting team, which will change in one pawn, maximum two, but which again last Sunday revealed all its character and technical difficulties and which will no longer have a charismatic leader or a thirty-point-per-game bomber, but two strong and regular players like Perry and Porro. It is difficult to expect exploits or big changes from a performance point of view, also considering that Perugia, Trento, Civitanova and very probably also Verona and Piacenza will remain several lengths ahead in terms of size and quality of the squad. In this sense, a European cup like the Challenge would have guaranteed a new and easier to conquer horizon, while the championship alone will hardly be able to be the harbinger of a path very different from the most recent ones, if something does not change radically.

Where to start again, then? The answer is simple, but there is a relationship to mend and the operation will not be easy. We must start again from Modena. From that environment, from that city and from those fans from whom the club has gradually and increasingly distanced itself, without speaking, without acting, without putting up a face or shield or anything else. It is an operation that requires time and humility, because mending relationships is very different from creating new ones, even more complex if the results do not arrive as hoped: but it is the only way to try to give those who go on the field that extra gear and stimulus that have been missing in the last two years. Missed like those people in the empty seats that are unfortunately noticed more and more often at the PalaPanini, even when the match is the last, even when it's called the final, even when to help Davyskiba and his teammates take that extra step they would need a pandemonium like in the old days. And instead, no.

Alessandro Trebbi