Daniele Santarelli
HEAD COACH
Born in ’81 , Umbrian from Foligno, after a career as a player up to the B1 series in the role of libero, he began coaching first in the youth sectors of his region, then as an assistant coach in the top league: in 2012/13 he was in Pesaro, then in Urbino and in 2014/15 with Davide Mazzanti at Pomì Casalmaggiore with whom he won the championship as assistant coach.
The following year he followed the current national team coach to Imoco Volleyball, where after two seasons as an assistant (with another Scudetto, a Supercup and an Italian Cup), he was promoted to head coach and hit the Scudetto, the Italian Cup final and the Champions League semifinals at the first attempt in 2018.
Since the summer of 2018, he has also been coach of Croatia.
In the 2018/19 season, he hits the tricolor encore with the second Scudetto on the bench of Conegliano, where he also wins the Supercup and reaches the Italian Cup final and the Champions League SuperFinal in Berlin, closed with the silver medal.
From that game on, an incredible series of victories and trophies for Coach Santarelli, who sets the “guinness” record of 76 consecutive games won in all competitions (as of December 2019, two years without defeat!).
In this golden period comes a World Club title (2019), a Champions League (2021), the Scudetto (2021) in addition to also dominating the scene in the Coppa Italia and Supercoppa editions.
A palmares only nicked by the non-displaying due to pandemic of the Scudetto playoffs and the final stages of the Champions League in 2020.
The path continued in the following season 2021/22 with the tricolor “triplte” (the fifth Scudetto, Supercup and Coppa Italia), while in the Champions and Club World Cup came the silver medal.
In 2022, the national team bench also changes on which the coach from Foligno sits as he becomes coach of the very strong Serbia, which he leads to the podium in the VNL and a fantastic encore at the World Cup in the Rotterdam final with Brazil.
He has been married to “his” libero Monica De Gennaro since 2017.
Hand in hand with his serial successes with Prosecco DOC Imoco, his career further took off in Turkey with the appointment as coach of the Crescent national team, immediately taken to unprecedented heights by winning the European Championship and VNL ’23, as well as the historic qualification for the Paris Olympics where he took fourth place.