How did the master help you acquire tools that enabled you to face the everyday challenges in your organisation/industry?
The master gave me both a technical toolkit and a broader professional perspective. I acquired frameworks for sports facility design and management, feasibility and business-plan analysis, and stakeholder and project management, tools I now apply when evaluating venue projects, structuring sponsorship relationships and organising events.
Just as valuable was working alongside classmates and experts from engineering, architecture, finance and club management. Coming from a career as a professional athlete, this taught me to read a sports organisation from the outside in, not only from the locker room, and to face new challenges with a structured method rather than intuition alone.”
How has the specialising master helped you cultivate your capital of human connections with professionals and companies?
Coming from twenty years inside Italian volleyball, my professional world was mostly the gym: teammates, coaches, club staff. The master opened a completely different door.
Part of it was simply who was in the room, people from federations and leagues, FIGC among them, from internationally recognised architecture practices, and from sports law. The sports law section was coordinated by Federico Venturi Ferriolo, Head of Sport at LCA Studio Legale, and he is still a reference point for me.
My classmates were engineers, architects and managers, looking at sport from angles I had never considered.
Two relationships in particular changed things. One led me to the AIS European Training Centre in Gavirate, where I later spent time working on athlete services and facility management, my first real experience on the other side of high performance.
There I met Fiona de Jong, who leads the centre after twelve years at the Australian Olympic Committee, where she delivered ten Olympic teams. Watching how she runs a high-performance environment taught me more about sports management than any single lecture could.
The other is Massimo Cortinovis, Head of Digital at Lega Basket Serie A, whose work showed me how a professional league actually builds its business.
Those conversations are still ongoing. That, more than anything, is what the master gave me.