Who Is Matilde Munarini: Stats, Career and the Middle Blocker's Jump

Who Matilde Munarini is

Matilde Munarini is an Italian middle blocker born in 2004, from Vicenza, 187 cm. From the 2026/27 season she plays for UYBA Volley Busto Arsizio, after a year at Conegliano that ended with the Scudetto and the Coppa Italia. People are talking about her because in 2025 she made her senior national team debut under Julio Velasco, after paying real dues in Serie A2.

One detail worth flagging, because old profiles are still floating around: a lot of people associate her with Conegliano, but her club for the 2026/27 season is UYBA.

Profile: the essentials

• Name: Matilde Munarini
• Year of birth: 2004
• Place of birth: Vicenza
• Position: middle blocker
• Height: 187 cm
• Club: UYBA Volley Busto Arsizio (from 2026/27)
• National team: Italy, senior debut in May 2025

There's no reliable public data on her vertical jump, so you won't find numbers here.

Her path through the clubs

Hers is a career built step by step, not by leaps into the void. Serie A2 at Brescia in 2022/23, then two seasons at Esperia Cremona, again in A2, in 2023/24 and 2024/25. Those are the years where she played a lot: for a young middle that's the thing that matters most, because you learn the position by reading real setters, not by drilling in isolation.

In 2025/26 she went back to Conegliano, where she came up, and closed the season with the Scudetto and the Coppa Italia. From 2026/27 she moves to UYBA Busto Arsizio to take on a fuller role in the middle.

Her national team career

The youth CV is heavy:

• silver at the Under-16 Europeans in 2019
• gold at the European Youth Olympic Festival in 2022
• gold at the Under-19 Europeans in 2023
• gold at the University Championships in 2025

Her senior debut came in May 2025 under Julio Velasco, and in one of the friendlies from that spell, Italy–Germany in Novara, she was named MVP.

What it physically takes to play middle

Middle blocker is the most misunderstood position in volleyball. From the outside it looks like only height counts. In reality the middle lives on timing: her jump is worth something not for how high it is in absolute terms, but for whether it arrives at the right instant.

The qualities that actually count:

• Fast lateral movement. At the net you have to cover from position 4 to position 2 in a fraction of a second, and arrive already balanced. If you arrive off-balance, the jump is compromised before it starts.
• Standing jump, not approach jump. At the block you have no room: you start from a static position, often after one or two lateral steps. It's a different action from the attack take-off and has to be trained separately.
• Jump frequency. A middle jumps far more times per set than it looks, between blocks and quick sets. Being able to repeat the action without losing centimetres is more useful than the peak.
• Ankle stiffness. Tall players tend to be slow in ground contact. Working on elastic stiffness in the ankle and foot is often the quickest gain for a middle.

Put bluntly: a middle who jumps 5 cm lower but leaves two tenths earlier blocks more. And those two tenths can be trained.

Where you're starting from

If you play in the middle and want to improve, the first thing to do isn't to add squats. It's to measure, and to measure the right thing: your standing jump. With the free JHP test you film two seconds of video and get your height in centimetres from flight time, with no equipment and without sending the video anywhere.

Once that's done, you train for a block, then measure again with exactly the same protocol. Measure first, then train, then measure again.

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