Former national team player Ivan Ječmenica appointed OSCG director of men’s national teams

Ivan Ječmenica, a long-time member of the men’s senior national team of Montenegro, was recently appointed as the new director in charge of the men’s national teams of the Volleyball Federation of Montenegro (OSCG). With this appointment, the Federation gains a significant reinforcement, and Ječmenica’s experience, which comes from the time he spent in Montenegro and France, will greatly contribute to the further growth of the OSCG sports department.

The OSCG President, Nikola Kažić, had previously appointed Ksenija Božović (formerly known under her maiden name as Ivanović) as the director responsible for the women’s national teams.
 
Since Montenegro’s independence, Ječmenica was first a member of the youth national teams, winning a junior gold medal at the Balkan Championship. He made his debut for the senior team in 2011 during the Olympic qualifiers for London 2012 under coach Ivan Joksimović, under whose leadership he also ended his career after the matchup against Czechia played in Kolašin this past August.
 
While wearing the senior national team jersey, Ječmenica played in two European Championships: in 2019 in France, Slovenia, Belgium, and the Netherlands, where Montenegro made their first historic appearance, and two years later in Ostrava, the host city for Montenegro in a championship that was contested also in Poland, Estonia, and Finland.
 
Ječmenica was a member of the team that won the European League title in 2014 and played in the final of Division III of the FIVB World League in 2015 against Egypt. He was also part of the successful campaigns at the Games of the Small States of Europe (GSSE) in 2011 in Liechtenstein and in 2019 in Budva, where Montenegro won two gold medals.
 
At the club level, the 34-year-old from Pljevlja ended his career with Budva, where he achieved a double crown, repeating the success of his previous stint on Montenegro’s coast, where, in the jersey of what was then known as Budvanska Rivijera, he won the Montenegrin Super League and Cup three times in a row between 2013 and 2016. He began playing volleyball at Rudar in his hometown Pljevlja and spent a season each with Studentski Centar and Budućnost.
 
He successfully wore the jersey of French club Cambrai Volley, where he played for as many as seven seasons, and with whom, in 2020, he helped secure a place in the elite division of French Volleyball for the first time in the club’s history.