Press conference
A press conference – broadcasted live on Channel 5 – was recently held at the premises of the “Wingate Institute” in Netanya where the head coaches and captains of the Israeli national teams discussed, together with the President of the Israel Volleyball Association, Jacob Shtofman, their expectations for this campaign. “I would like to express my joy for having the men’s national team also participating in the European League” said Mr. Shtofman.
“Although we are being confronted with financial constraints, we do our best to support the activities and development of our national teams. We have a lot of expenses, especially in order to guarantee the security of our players, and we have approached quite many sponsors to get their support but so far did not receive a positive feedback” he continued. He also stressed that the development projects implemented by the IVA are producing good results as a couple of young players – Ariel Katzenelson and Tamir Hershko – coming out of the IVA Volleyball Academy recently joined the men’s national team displaying very solid performances in their opening matches this past week in Greece.
Dr. Arie Selinger insisted in saying that the European League is an excellent opportunity to test out young players as he is about to rejuvenate the group. “I would like to praise the efforts that are being made to support the men’s national team as they have finally started working with a well-defined program and their participation in the European League represents quite evidently a huge step forward for Volleyball here in Israel. As for my group, we qualified for the final four two years ago as we had just joined the European League while last year we lost all of our matches. We do not have high expectations for this campaign as our main goal remains to get some valuable experience and get ready for the second qualifying round for the 2013 European Championship which is scheduled for September. We are coming back from a very fruitful training camp in Slovenia and feel ready to play our rivals this weekend, namely the Czech Republic, Greece and the Netherlands. I have been working with these young girls for five months and I think they can go for a bright future, also not ruling out that we can have our own chances with Spain, Slovakia and Sweden when it comes to try to qualify for the next edition of the European Championship”.
“This group has been completely rejuvenated in comparison with the past years but we have been working hard and even though we do not have so high expectations for the time being, we shall be able to improve match after match and reach our top for the European qualifiers in September” added team captain Ron Ponte.
