Impact Of A Scholarship: Carlotta Oggioni

Growing up in Rome, family was the cornerstone of Carlotta Oggioni’s life. Every activity that Oggioni did growing up was with family, whether it was enjoying a meal around the dinner table or playing volleyball. If there was an activity that Oggioni did, the whole clan would join in.

“I grew up with, like a sense of everything we do, we do it together,” Oggioni said. “All the activities we did growing up were very family based.”

Oggioni came from a volleyball family, where both of her parents and her sister played the sport. She picked up the game at five years old, and had plenty of opportunities to have a long playing career in Italy, where the sport’s culture is well established and the sport’s popularity is close to soccer in the country. 

Her dreams became a reality early, as she reached the pro level as a teenager. But once it became clear that Oggioni could go far in the world of volleyball, even a city as big as Rome could not contain her aspirations. While still in high school, she moved into the northern part of Italy to pursue her dreams as a professional volleyball player, leaving her family behind in the Eternal City.

Juggling a professional volleyball career while trying to graduate high school was a difficult task for Oggioni, and while she wanted to pursue an education and compete at the highest level in Italy, she didn’t have the resources to handle both at the same time. As a result, competing at the collegiate level in the United States became an appealing option.

“If you decide to play pro here, it is tough to study what you want to study and take time to go to class, so I would have given at least school for that, and I didn’t want to do that,” Oggioni said. “The reason I came to the US is because I could combine both worlds with school and volleyball at a high level. So it was perfect for me.”

Eventually through her search process, Oggioni found Maryland, a school that fit everything on her bucket list: a tight-knit volleyball team that was similar to her family growing up, a big city on the scale of Rome in the form of Washington DC and a world-class education where she could advance her dreams on the court and in the classroom.

“I was able to experience school and volleyball at a high level, and at the end of the day, having a scholarship gives you a responsibility to do well and make the most of your time,” Oggioni said. “I think it was a great opportunity to understand who I was and who I wanted to be, and I think Maryland just gave me that first very important step of this journey, so I am always grateful for the role the university played in my life.”

Oggioni’s collegiate journey did not initially start in College Park. At first, her main goal was to make it stateside and enroll in any university she could find. She didn’t know how to speak much English at the time and enlisted the help of an agency to guide Oggioni through the paperwork process needed to go to school in America. After she took an English proficiency test, the agency got in contact with schools of interest, and a couple schools even made the trip to watch Oggioni play in Italy’s Serie B league.

Eventually, Oggioni received an official scholarship offer from Oregon State to play PAC-12 volleyball. She had never visited Corvallis, OR, and knew that after one year of playing for the Beavers, she wanted to pursue an opportunity elsewhere.

Oggioni’s experience in the transfer portal felt much more like a traditional recruiting experience with official visits where she could truly feel out the vibe of the school she wanted to attend. Through the transfer process, she landed on Maryland, which felt close to Rome in the opportunities she’d have in the DMV area.

“What you feel walking around in DC is just a little similar to walking around Rome,” Oggioni said. “You see people, and many of them are working, but some people were just chilling at a bar or grabbing a beer or something like that. It was just a different type of feel. It brought me back to feeling it was actually closer to Rome. It is very far but it's closer to the people and places that I saw there.”

Once she arrived at Maryland, she received the collegiate volleyball experience she imagined when she took the risk of moving a continent away. She had the chance to play volleyball while at the same time earning her degree in economics with the help of her coaches and professors.

“I felt it was easier to actually be an athlete (at Maryland),” Oggioni said. “From my experience in Italy, it was always like two worlds. And so sometimes, professors wouldn't really like the fact that I wasn't studying that much, but in the US I feel like the professors and coaches understood you need to study and you need to play, so they gave me the best opportunity to do both well.”

Along with having the opportunity to play volleyball and pursue higher education, Oggioni found a home within Maryland volleyball that was similar to her own in Rome. With a team that grew together during strenuous preseason training sessions, she fell in love with the culture that pushed her to be her best on and off the court.

Additionally, then-head coach Steve Aird invited the team over to his house to have meals with his family, further strengthening the team and its bond with one another.

“I think that was really cool for him and his wife to cook for us and welcome us in,” Oggioni said. “When he invited us over, it felt like it was home for us too.”

Oggioni joined the program in 2014 during a momentous time in Maryland volleyball history, as her first season coincided with the Terps’ debut campaign in the Big Ten. One moment from that first season that stands out is when Oggioni and Maryland traveled to Lincoln, NE, to take on No. 11 Nebraska in the Devaney Center. 

In front of a capacity crowd, the Terps lost in four sets, but she said the mentality of the program shifted into focusing on what they needed to do to reach the Big Ten’s elite.

“It was like, ‘Okay, welcome to the Big Ten,’” Oggioni said. “From there, I felt like the locker room kind of changed. We were trying to focus more on what we needed to do to get to that level.”

While Oggioni’s career at Maryland lasted just three seasons, the effects of the time playing college volleyball in the toughest conference in the sport lasted a lifetime. She graduated in 2016 with her bachelor’s degree in economics and completed her MBA back home in Italy.

The former Terps setter continued to play volleyball back home in Italy, continuing to play the game she has spent her whole life playing. Along with that, Oggioni has taken lessons from her time of being recruited overseas to create her own business, Aced, which seeks to be a social media space for athletes, agents, sponsors and other power players in the world of sports to connect with each other.

The lessons taught from handling both work and volleyball have proven beneficial for her as she works to play high-level volleyball professionally while working overtime to launch Aced and see its success.

Oggioni is thankful that she had the opportunity to learn how to handle a college class schedule while playing Big Ten volleyball, and believes her scholarship has gone a long way toward making her a better volleyball player on the court and a great business leader off it.

“I really appreciate what the Terrapin Club does and a scholarship gives you the opportunity to better yourself not only as an athlete, but as a person as well,” Oggioni said. “Coming from overseas, I had never really had much of an opportunity to experience life in America, so the scholarship helped me to experience that while playing the sport I love while taking a big first step toward my career aspirations.”