Fefè De Giorgi tells how he transformed the Italy of volleyball

With his calm and serenity he struck President Mattarella. With his irony and his sympathy he infected the Azzurri of volleyball which, with his guidance, then led to European and World gold medals. In Italy there is no one who has won four World Cups and two Europeans like Ferdinando Fefe De Giorgi. He started on the pitch, lifting the ball to the first generation of our volleyball phenomena, he is continuing on the bench in command of a new generation of phenomena who won everything in one year and now he has to pretend not to think that in 2024 there are the Games that have always been forbidden for us.

As long as there’s a joke, De Giorgi is in the front row. He likes to laugh and make people laugh. “Let’s always remember that we play sports, we don’t go to the mines,” says the ex-boyfriend who comes from Salento, from a small town, Squinzano, north of Lecce. In the gym, however, he changes his face and there is little time left to laugh. “I don’t like mediocrity, I like people who always go 100 per cent, I’m demanding in training, but if I’m joking, I don’t forget it. I like to live with irony. I have a happy idea of ​​life”. And he shows it.

Take him off the bench and from the dressing room and put him on the stage of a theater for an evening with two of his old companions like Zorro Zorzi and Gardo Gardini and with the infinite Francesca Piccinini, expertly directed by Roberto Righi, general manager of Prometeon who organized the evening chatting around the “Generations of phenomena” of volleyball. It is enough to understand why Ferdinando De Giorgi was nicknamed the Mosca Fefè. “More than a generation of phenomena we were a generation of miners”, he begins by explaining that that Italy, born with Velasco and then continued almost indefinitely, was based more on work and determination than on talent. De Giorgi always has a joke ready. On Zorro’s nose, the big feet of Gardini, the marble Piccinini. He steals questions from whoever he wants to lead. A showman. If Amadeus saw him and had Picci’s physique, we would probably see him in Sanremo. De Giorgi is a team man. “I learned at home, we were nine brothers. If we didn’t play as a team and get a little clever, it was over”. It comes from Salento which he has never abandoned. He comes from the oratory where one day, hearing the magical sound of a ball hit well in a dunk, he understood that he wanted to play volleyball. He wasn’t tall, but those five centimeters less were transformed from a limit into a stimulus to go further. Something he did first on the pitch and then on the bench. In Italy you won’t find others with four world gold medals (and two European) in their pockets. “The taste of victory is always nice, but experiencing it as a player or as a coach is different. As a player you experience the joy of yourself within the team, as a coach you experience it more completely because you know that there is so much of yours inside that success. You put your ideas, chose the players, created the team, a game idea, the staff. You know you have built something of your own. A coach has a lot of weight being built, then during the game the ball passes into the hands of the players. You have to do the big job first, during the game you manage to affect less. Exaggerating, we can say that the coach counts 100 percent in building, while during the match if you can count 20-30 percent you’re already doing a good job.”

This explains why De Giorgi is calm and serene on the bench, as President Mattarella also underlined: “I try to get to matches after doing my best, but it’s a bit of my character nature. I try to make an impact in moments when it can be decisive. When the game arrives, the effort I make is to try to be useful to the players, to experience the game without getting carried away by competitive spirit, trying to be as lucid as possible. Today everything is faster, you can’t wait to make your decisions, you risk losing the moment and then those points become difficult to recover”.

“To be a coach you must have had the call a bit like a missionary – he says – Ever since I was playing my goal was to grow and improve, today I try to get my players to do it. I do the things I believe in, something that is not so obvious. Since I started as a child, I wrote down the things I liked in a notebook, an exercise in training, a phrase from a coach or an important player. I’ve always had a mania for taking notes, but I didn’t think of coaching. When they gave me the first career award at 33, I said: you never give a career award to an active player because it’s like sending him a message… That’s when I started thinking about the future, my role, that of setter , it helps to think like a coach. Then in Cuneo they asked me to coach, but at 38 I still didn’t feel like quitting and so they offered me to be a player coach for two years and those were two very important years as I began to build my philosophy and I understood how important it is to have a staff, know how to delegate. With me I have those who follow the technical part, the physical and the mental part. I have always had the educator with me because he interests me very much in the learning part and in the value part ”.

De Giorgi became coach after the Tokyo Olympics. He had 20 days, six training sessions and two friendlies, to build his national team for the European Championship. “I asked myself: do I make a comfortable choice and continue with who was at the Games or do I go with the generational change? I made the least comfortable choice, but more useful for the future. I said to myself: if there are good young people around, someone has to give them the opportunity. I do not deny that Mancini inspired and stimulated me. He had brought people to the national team that I had never heard of. He had trusted the young people by going to look for them. I did the same. I studied, searched and found young people with great potential. And in the end I sent a message: I put the value of the blue shirt back in the center. If you don’t feel energy, pride and responsibility when you wear that shirt, something is wrong.” On Monday at Coni he will find himself side by side with Mancini, Pozzecco and Campagna, the football, basketball and water polo coaches, all former players like him. The conference, promoted by Gianni Petrucci’s federbasket, is entitled “Training blue” (at 11.30, live on the twitch channel of the Fip Italbasketofficial) “A nice idea – he adds – It would be important to organize a couple of meetings a year to exchange ideas, opinions, experiences among team sports coaches”. Today, Italy is the European and world champion of volleyball with a national team that has an average age of 23.8 years. “The result is important, but growing and improving must be our mantra and these guys still have a huge margin for growth”. The Olympics, the true bete noire of our volleyball, are already there on the horizon.