Who Is Tommaso Guzzo: Stats, Career and the Opposite's Jump
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Tommaso Guzzo is an Italian opposite, born in 2002, who from the 2026/27 season plays for Yuasa Battery Grottazzolina in Serie A2 after a year in SuperLega with Cisterna. People are talking about him because he's one of the most reliable Italian scorers of his generation: the Gianfranco Badiali award as the best under-23 in A2, and a place on the 30-man Italy list for VNL 2026.
Profile: the essentials
- Full name: Tommaso Guzzo
- Born: 30 April 2002, in Monselice (Padova)
- Position: opposite
- Height: 198 cm according to his Lega Pallavolo Serie A profile
- Club 2026/27: Yuasa Battery Grottazzolina, Serie A2
- National team: Italy. He's on the 30-man list for the 2026 Volleyball Nations League
No verified official Instagram profile, so we're not linking one. No photos of him either, for the usual reason: we don't hold the rights.
His path through the clubs
Guzzo made his top-flight debut early: from 2020/21 to 2023/24 he was at Padova, four straight seasons in Serie A1, starting at eighteen.
In 2024/25 he made a choice Italians rarely make: he dropped to A2 with Ravenna to play as a starter. The result was the best season of his career. Lega Volley reports he came close to 550 points in the league and finished among the most prolific scorers in the division; at the end of the year came the Gianfranco Badiali award as the best Italian under-23 in A2.
That season opened SuperLega back up for him: 2025/26 at Cisterna, where he started for much of the first half of the season and set his personal best of 25 points in a match — against Grottazzolina, as it happens.
In the summer of 2026 the transfer market took him back to A2, but to Yuasa Battery Grottazzolina. Worth saying plainly: on paper it's a step down. In practice it's the same logic as 2024, which is playing every ball instead of waiting your turn. For a 24-year-old opposite, the number of attacks in a year counts for more than the name of the league.
The national team
Guzzo joined the Italy group in 2026: first the 30-man VNL list, then the training camp and the friendlies in May. He's also expected at the Mediterranean Games in Taranto between late August and early September 2026.
What it physically takes to play opposite at a high level
Opposite is the position where the physical side shows most, but not in the way people think. The single hardest swing isn't what counts. What counts is how many times you can repeat it the same.
An opposite is the end point of the attack: the hard ball goes to him. Emergency side-out, bad pass, end of the set, fifth set. In a long match he can hit more than anyone else on court. That gives you three priorities:
- Repeatable power. You don't need a peak you can pull out once. You need a jump that on the thirtieth attack is still close to the first one. You train that with controlled volume and with strength, not with plyometrics alone.
- A short, adaptable approach. From position 2 you often have less room and the ball arrives awkwardly. You have to be able to take off with two steps instead of three.
- A shoulder that handles the load. An opposite's arm is under stress every session. The rotator cuff and scapular mobility need looking after before they hurt, not afterwards.
- A fast-loading jump. Against a block that's already set, you often win on timing, not on height. How quickly you go from planting to taking off weighs as much as the centimetres.
So where's your jump right now?
If you're an opposite, the number you care about isn't only how high you jump. It's how high you jump today compared with two months ago, and how much of it is left at the end of the match.
You get the first one straight away: with the free JHP jump test you upload a two-second video and read your height in centimetres, worked out from flight time. The analysis runs in the browser and the video never leaves your device. Measure now, then measure again at the end of a training block.
The second one you build with the work: the JHP programmes are set up exactly like that — measure, block of work, measure again.
The next step
An opposite doesn't jump once: he jumps fifty times
And the jump that matters is the one in the fifth set, not the one in the warm-up. Start from a real measurement, train, then measure again: without the first number you don't even know if you're improving.
Measure your jump — free JHP subscription — €99/yearTo work on repeatable power in a structured way: JHP Contrast Method, €90.
