The coach of the Saint-Jean d’Illac volleyball club, Anisse Guechou, is enjoying the title of French League B champion. And is already planning for the future, within the elite.
A title of champion of France and a rise in Ligue A. Is it a dream season that you experienced this year?
Yes in the work, even if everything was not easy. We had our share of adventures on illnesses, internal things, injuries… We managed to create a real structure to be able to overcome all these adventures. The group was simply fantastic in terms of cohesion and work, which allowed us to give ourselves this opportunity to play for the title and win it.
What does this symbolize for you as a coach?
A lot of happiness already (smile). We will practice our passion at the highest level, we will become more professional. Behind it, it’s about determination, commitment, work to potentially master all aspects of performance because we’re up against teams who want exactly the same objective as us. In the end, there is only one winner and many losers. It’s hanging by a thread. It is a long work of eleven months, to build the team, to train it, to motivate it on a daily basis.
What do you think explains this success?
The consistency of the project. Each club has its identity, its objectives, its parameters. We took the time with the club president, Stéphane Hassoun, and the manager to create a club that resembles us. It really had to be complementary, for it to make sense. Our speech is clear and coherent. Even when you fail and you don’t win, it’s never a disappointment.
We are a very small town or a large village (smile). The club has been training young talents for nearly 50 years despite the fact that we are only Saint-Jean d’Illac. We had to take this into account in the professionalization project and make it our strength. To train players, we concentrated and focused on players we knew, that is to say on players from French training. All this remains consistent with our locality and our history.
In your eyes, what has changed the situation this season?
It doesn’t play out much. In five years we made three semi-finals where each time we played against the ogre of the division, once Paris, the other time Saint-Nazaire. There is bound to be some success along the way. The key factor is the complementarity and cohesion of the team. It’s really a bunch of friends who come from totally different worlds, but it matched from day one. There was a mutual respect, this desire to fight for them but also for the collective project. This is our success.
How do you see yourself in League A now?
We want to continue to give priority to players from the French formation. We want to rely on players we know. Depending on the skills that will be needed to find a team, technical and physical balance, we will do our best to keep this DNA. We want to find this happy medium, so that our sporting coherence goes with our project.
I think it’s harder to stay in Ligue A than to move up to Ligue A. In the sense that the dynamics are different. It’s easy to come to practice when you’ve just won six games in a row. On the other hand, when you’ve just lost six, it’s been for nothing and you have negative pressure, it will be more complicated mentally.
Financially, we will be the little thumb of the championship (smile). We will have to create an extraordinary cohesion to be able to confront these teams. We will have to be very smart about recruitment. We will have to believe in it from the beginning to the end, whatever the dynamics and the scenario of the season.
Interview by Séverine Bouquet
