In the Beginning There Was Basketball
It was a moment of high symbolic value, the 2002-2003 academic year, and Bocconi University was immersed in the celebrations for its 100th anniversary. As part of the numerous events organized to honor that moment, a basketball game was played in Milan's historic Palalido in Piazza Stuparich that pitted a team of students against one made up of faculty and staff members. At the end of that match, a student, Alessio Bellincampi, proposed forming a team that would represent the Bocconi community as a whole. Two professors and an employee of the University (Carlo Favero, Stefano Zorzoli and Graziano Pravettoni), who are still involved today both at the managerial and staff level, took up the proposal and so the amateur Pellicani Basketball Association was born. It was the first the nucleus of what is now an all-round organization, the Bocconi Sport Team SSD, which fields female and male teams in federal and university championships, amateur activities and internal tournaments and events, with several hundred members among all the components of the Bocconi world.
What are its highest levels of competition? "Certainly men's basketball, which now plays in the C2 Gold series, men's 5-a-side football, also in C2, women's volleyball in the first division and men's volleyball in Serie C, which play in the FIPAV regional championships, and lacrosse, a relatively new sport in Italy, which has found a center of excellence in Bocconi, with the men's team that has been crowned Italian champion several times ", says Roberto Grassi, president of the Sport Team. The sports club currently has about 250 athletes involved in the teams participating in various competitive leagues, but many more apply to join them. The disciplines represented are various, some recently established in addition to those already mentioned: basketball, volleyball, 5-a-side and 11-a-side football, lacrosse, tennis, athletics, cycling, swimming, water polo, golf, polo, rugby and running. Many will get a new, further impulse from the recently opened Bocconi Sport Center, an innovative, versatile and eco-sustainable facility where there is an Olympic swimming pool, a multipurpose sports arena, an elevated athletics track and a fitness gym. "A facility that finally allows us to give a unique home for training and matches to indoor sports teams and the testimony that the University increasingly believes in sport as a tool for socializing and building values ​​among students, alumni, staff and faculty of an international university that welcomes young people from all over the world to Milan ", concludes Grassi.