In line with Sweden's women's volleyball team starting to achieve athletic results, the association invested more purposefully in the national team.
The conditions regarding travel, accommodation, and the length of the gatherings improved. National team veteran Alexandra Lazic remembers how it was in the past.
It has been an incredibly long journey. At some point, we traveled over 40 hours by bus – I think we were training in Poland and traveled to France by bus. To then fly to Israel, says the 30-year-old.
Flight canceled
She tells about how the team was affected during a trip from Warsaw early in her national team career. After a 12-hour wait at the airport, the message came that the flight was definitely canceled.
It was probably expensive to put us all in a hotel and it was also in the middle of the night. But our team manager was from Poland. So we all went to her family's apartment. Then the whole squad, 15 girls plus the leadership, slept in a two-room apartment in Poland, says Alexandra Lazic and laughs.
Nowadays, they don't have to squeeze in. In recent years, they have, for example, loaded up in Halmstad with training camps and live comfortably at a hotel in the city center.
Previously, you found solutions by having several people in one room, now it's completely different. We can train in a fantastic arena and everything is good around us. So it's completely different conditions, says Lazic and continues:
We also have leaders who have better conditions and more experience, which means the team can develop at the level that all top teams are.
"Incredibly cool"
It is primarily during the 2020s that the athletic journey has taken off in earnest with two consecutive European Championship finals, a win in the national team tournament Golden League (2024), and now a first World Championship final.
Previously, you were happy to win a single set. Now you get a little disappointed when you don't play the final in the Golden League. It's incredibly cool to see how far we've come – that we have these expectations and demands on ourselves, says Alexandra Lazic.
The World Championship premiere against the Netherlands starts at 12.00, Swedish time.
The women's volleyball World Championship is played in Thailand from August 22 to September 7. It is the first time that Sweden's women's national team has qualified for a World Championship.
Sweden's group A is decided in Bangkok. Blue and yellow (ranked 26th in the world) face the Netherlands (8), Thailand (21), and Egypt (53).
A total of 32 nations are participating, divided into eight four-team groups. The two top teams from each group advance to the round of 16.
Sweden's matches:
Friday, August 22: Netherlands (12.00, Swedish time).
Sunday, August 24: Thailand (15.30).
Tuesday, August 26: Egypt (12.00).
Other host cities are Phuket, Chiang Mai, and Nakhon Ratchasima. All playoff matches and medal matches are played in Bangkok.
