Volero Zurich is back
Volleyball – Volero Zurich is back in Swiss volleyball. Four years after outsourcing the professional team to France and withdrawing to the 1st league, they win the Volero Women’s Cup.
The Zurich women beat Düdingen in two hours with 20:18 in the tie-break in the hall in Winterthur, which was sold out for both cup finals. Volero Zurich used the eighth match point. In the fifth set, Freiburg caught up three times from a three-point deficit (0:3, 4:7, 11:14), but did not earn a match point.
It may have happened before that an NLB team wins the Swiss Cup. Nobody at the volleyball association remembers that. Volero’s 14th cup win, the first since 2018, was completely unexpected, but not. Volero beat four NLA teams (including the final) in the cup. They managed to get promoted back into the NLA this season completely unchallenged. All season long she only gives up two sentences before the cup final.
The Volero Zurich, which has now won the cup and wants to get involved in the NLA again next season, is no longer very different from the club that dominated women’s volleyball almost at will until 2018. The structure of the club is still the same. Volero has excellent training facilities, numerous electronic means, but has so far been used on young (professional) players and no longer on established volleyball players with world-class level. Volero also has a very experienced coach in Svetlana Ilic – and Stav Jacobi continues to preside over the club.
The competition is following Volero’s rise critically. The women’s volleyball championship has been more exciting than ever in the last two years. Nobody would want a team in the NLA that, like Volero, used to play the competition to the ground.
Disappointment for Düdingen
On Saturday, the women of Düdinger were left with their long faces. Everything has gone wrong for the Freiburg women in the last few days. They are out of the playoffs in the semi-finals because the series against Neuchâtel was broken off because the opponents complained of a corona outbreak (and which provides for questionable regulations that in such a case the series is reduced to “best of 3”). Nothing came of the rehabilitation with the cup win. Düdingen doesn’t seem to be able to win any national titles.
Volley Düdingen won the Supercup in 2015. But in the much more important competitions NLA (final defeats 2021) and Swiss Cup (final defeats 2015, 2016, 2022), the women from Düdingen have already lost four finals.
Also men’s final in the tiebreak
In the men’s field, the volleyball players from Amriswil became Swiss Cup winners for the seventh time in their 15th final. The Thurgau, qualification winners and current playoff finalists in the championship, also win against Schönenwerd in five sets (23:25, 25:23, 20:25, 25:22, 15:6). Amriswil was also a cup winner in 1999, 2009, 2012, 2017, 2018 and 2019.
The result of the final confirms duels in the championship of the current season. Thurgau wins in all three direct encounters with Solothurn in the NLA, twice 3-1, once even 3-0.
The newly formed Schönenwerder team around coach Johan Verstappen failed in its third final participation, just like in the women’s Düdingen. Just a year ago, it also lost to Jona in a hard-fought match.