After 13 years, Mario Ghiacci’s time at Pallacanestro Trieste has reached the end of its cycle. It ends in the best way: a promotion to Serie A after just one year of purgatory, with a solid ownership that seems to have very clear ideas, as demonstrated by perseverance and the objective achieved with an exponential growth of the team, after the many uncertainties in the central part of the championship. Ghiacci was interviewed for the pages of “Il Piccolo”. “The promotion to Serie A, achieved on Wednesday against Cantù, It takes a weight off my heart. Credit must be given to those who managed this season, I must say that I was particularly happy because Trieste’s return to the top flight erases a relegation that I have always considered a real injustice.”
In Trieste Ghiacci is more than a manager. “The love for this club, for its fans and for the city in general will remain unchanged. Pallacanestro Trieste has been a job, without a doubt, but there has always been much more. It has represented an important parenthesis in my life so much so that today, the idea of committing myself to another club would seem like a sort of betrayal to me. Then in sport, never say never.”
After Cosolini and Alma here is Cotogna, his latest success as a manager. “When in February 2022 Allianz informed me that it would end its sponsorship of Pallacanestro Trieste in June, I began to move. I knew that the prosecutor Dario Santrolli, at the time when Toti was president in Rome, had brought an American entrepreneur interested in investing in basketball and I asked him if he was aware of possible investors interested in landing in Italy. Through Ron Rowan he put us in contact with the university professor who held the sports management courses that the Cotogna members attended, he talked about it in the classroom and it all started from there. Later, having learned that Richard De Meo was in Italy, I invited him to come to Trieste for two days, showing him the city, the stadium and trying to involve him. Once he returned to the United States, convinced by the wonderful report given to his colleagues, the Cotogna group began the due diligence which lasted for months at the end of which he decided to acquire the shares of Pallacanestro Trieste, becoming its owner. I must say with pride that having kept the accounts in order despite going through the difficult years of Covid was the fundamental condition for the successful outcome of the negotiation.”
