The son of Daniele, former Italian player and spiker in Serie A with Parma and Treviso, has been called up for the Under 17 World Cup qualifiers
Hand on heart and pride in representing his country. Gabriele Desiderio, spiker of 2010, is ready to earn the Under 17 World Championships scheduled for next year and his father Daniele is rightly proud of him. In the footsteps of his father (former Serie A player who won an Under 19 World Cup and played for Sisley Treviso, Ferrara, Parma among others) like the various Boninfante, Bovolenta, Gardini… Ah no. Or at least not exactly. He will wear the national team shirt but it will be the stars and stripes one of the USA where in the call-up they call him Gabe. And it will be a first time for Italy too. We are used to the reverse path: Zlatanov, Zaytsev, Antonov, Baranowicz, all sons of former players born or moved to Italy at a very young age who chose the blue shirt.
“I would have liked to see him play for Italy – says Daniele, 46 years old – but Gabriele is an “American boy”. We arrived here when he was four years old, even though we speak Italian at home he is truly American, passionate about skateboarding and snowboarding, I also got him interested in football. I invited him and his friends to try out with us for a year and they never stopped. Then two years ago I also took him to Italy to see the playoffs and the training sessions of Lorenzetti who was my teacher. He even did a month with the Trento team playing and winning the Boy League (U14) finals with Itas. He was enthusiastic but the future is in the USA.”
the American opportunity
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And here we need to take a step back. Daniele tells how from Italy he and his wife Olda ended up in the States where the little girl Grace was born: “The last years of my career (between Puerto Rico, Japan, Dubai and Spain) I played with many Americans, in particular with Matt Fuerbringer who then joined the national team’s staff. He invited me to California to work in his volleyball academy. We said why not, I was curious. Then we saw that private academies could be a winning idea and we stayed with Olda who takes care of the more administrative and marketing part and I of the technical one. We started with 70 kids and reached almost 300 males and females”.
illustrious collaborators
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The additional weapon was the contacts with European volleyball: “In addition to the people, I know the mechanisms of volleyball in Europe where the coaches have no guarantee of continuous work. So I have had valuable coaches such as Emanuele Zanini, now Andrea Burattini, who moved here from Bulgaria where he raised the Nukolov brothers, but also Fernanda (former Brazilian national team who won Olympic gold in London), Keba Phipps (unforgettable protagonist of our championship with Matera and Bergamo) who works with us. And Carlos de Lellis collaborates with us as a physical trainer.” Thus the boy from Catania who moved to Parma as a teenager and made his debut in A1 at 16, became a volleyball teacher in California, near Palo Alto, also collaborating with the US youth national teams. And he also pushed for the creation of the Under 17 team which the USA usually didn’t do: “With the US sports/scholastic system the selections usually begin in a higher age group but volleyball is growing a lot in notoriety and in my opinion setting such young kids as an objective to represent the USA is a great incentive”. But if Gabe decides to continue his sporting career, a move to the Italian championship will be inevitable: “Well maybe, he has the passport so all that remains is to wait.”
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