Bricio aiming to lead young Mexican generation to glory
LAUSANNE, Switzerland, June 23, 2020 – Every young volleyball
player in Mexico has a role model in Samantha Bricio. The most
successful player in the country, the 25-year-old outside hitter
also hopes to be the driving force as her country chases
positive results in the future.
The youngest player to ever wear the Mexican national team
uniform, Bricio, who first joined the team when she was 13, has
spent the first four years of her professional career playing in
some of the best leagues in Europe.
She has won medals in three consecutive editions of the European
Champions League and was part of an extremely successful Imoco
Volley Conegliano team that won the Italian League, the Italian
Cup and the Supercopa in a two-year span.
She also played for Turkey’s Fenerbahce, where she took silver
in the Turkish Cup, before returning to Italy last season to
join Savino Del Bene Scandicci. And Bricio is now set to join
another giant on the continent, Russia’s Dinamo Kazan, in the
upcoming season.
“To be honest, the thought of being considered a veteran in the
national team at the age of 25 sometimes scares me, but I’m for
sure a senior in our team,” Bricio reflected in an interview
with the European Volleyball Federation Youtube channel. “All
the other girls on the team are pretty young, they’re all 17 or
18 years old, so I’ve accepted that I’m a senior at this
point.”
The Mexicans have appeared in four of the last five editions of
the FIVB Volleyball World Championships and competed in four
consecutive FIVB World Grand Prix tournaments between 2014 and
2017. Returning to the Olympics for the first time since 1968
when Mexico City hosted the event, however, is still only a
dream.
Located in a region with a tradition of volleyball, where it has
to battle some of the sport’s strongest national teams in the
United States, the Dominican Republic, Canada, Puerto Rico and
Cuba for Olympic berths, the Mexicans showed signs of
improvement during January’s NORCECA Olympic Qualifier in Santo
Domingo, taking the hosts to five sets and stealing a set from
Canada.
“The Olympics are the ultimate goal for any team and it’s the
same for us,” the outside hitter added. “Our last tournament as
a team was the last opportunity we had to go to the Tokyo
Olympics and it was a good one. We almost beat the Dominican
Republic, we took them to five sets, which was pretty good for
us.”
The star outside hitter, considered the Most Valuable Player of
the 2016-2017 Italian Cup and the best server of the 2018-2019
European Champions League, spent four years refining her game
while studying at the University of Southern California, in Los
Angeles, USA, before moving to Europe.
The Mexican, who became a standout for the programme and was
recognised as the best collegiate player in the country in 2016,
will now see several of her fellow national team players take
the same route and join American universities this year.
“Several of the younger players in our team will go to the
United States for college now and I’m confident they will
benefit a lot from all the training and opportunities they will
have there,” Bricio commented. “It will have a massive impact in
their development and it will make us stronger as a team, so I’m
very confident and excited to see what they can do.” |