21/10/2016 10:05
Montenegro’s Volleyball rising star looks forward to Champions League home debut
2017 CEV Volleyball Champions League - Women
Bar, Montenegro, October 21, 2016. She started playing for her country’s senior national team at the tender age of 15 and as a result she is regarded as the rising star of Montenegrin Volleyball. Melisa Cenovic, who is now 18, just made her debut in the elite CEV Volleyball Champions League with Luka BAR – and even though on Tuesday she lost the first matchup with Estonia’s KOHILA VC, the expectations for the remake coming up on Saturday, October 22, remain high.
Melisa started practicing Volleyball when she was only eight years old. She inherited physical and technical abilities from her late father, Mirsad Cenovic, who used to play handball for the highly successful Mornar team from the city of Bar. At 11 years of age, Melisa started her career with the youth teams of Luka BAR and only three years later she joined the Montenegrin senior national team for the first time.
Luka BAR have been the dominant force in women’s Volleyball in the Balkan country – and with this team Cenovic has been crowned a national champion as many as four times and on top of this she has three titles from the National Cup.
Talking about the future, Melisa has set out very clear goals: “Since my childhood I always dreamed of playing in Italy and I hope one day I will be able to move to that country because this would help develop my skills and gain more experience. However, education also plays an important role in my life and after graduating from high school I am planning to go to college and enrol in a programme which somehow deals with sport, maybe studying sports journalism,” says the young lady from Bar.
With regards to the upcoming re-match with KOHILA VC, Cenovic says: “If we play as we are capable of and fix the mistakes we made a few days ago in Estonia, I think we can achieve a result that would take us to the next round of the 2017 CEV Volleyball Champions League.” If Cenovic and her teammates succeed in doing so, they would play their neighbours of Vizura BEOGRAD (Serbia) in the next stage of Europe’s elite club competition.
|