Tomas Ress

Tomas Ress
Player information
birthday	August 22, 1980
place of birth	Salorno, Italy
size	208 cm
position	Power Forward / Center
college	Texas A&M
Clubs as active
1997–1998 Virtus Kinder Bologna 1999–2003 Texas A&M Aggies ( NCAA ) 2003–2005 Scavolini Pesaro 2005–2006 Fortitudo Climamio Bologna 2006–2007 Bipop Carire Reggio Emilia 2007–2014 Montepaschi Siena 2014–2018 Umana Venice
National team
2001-2010	Italy

Tomas Ress (born August 22, 1980 in Salurn , South Tyrol ) is a former Italian basketball player . After studying in the United States , Ress began his career as a professional player in the Lega Basket Serie A in his homeland, Italy. Ress had his most successful time from 2007 to 2014 at Montepaschi Siena, with whom he was able to become Italian champion six times in a row , five of which in combination with winning the “Coppa Italia” cup competition as a double . Since the 2014/15 season , Ress played for the first division club Umana Venice, with whom he won his eighth championship title as team captain in 2017 .

Career

Ress joined the youth teams of Virtus Pallacanestro from Bologna , whose professional men's team, children, was among the best in Europe at the time. In the 1997/98 season Ress completed a brief assignment in the top Italian division Serie A1 , before Kinder won the Italian championship for the 14th time in the play-off final series against the runner-up and local rivals Fortitudo Teamsystem at the end of the season . Led by Antoine Rigaudeau and Predrag Danilović , they also won the FIBA European Champion Clubs' Cup for the first time in 1998 , in which the young talent Ress had a brief appearance in the home win against the then German champions Alba Berlin . Ress then went to the United States, where he was preparing to study at the Champagnat Catholic School in Hialeah . In 1999, he won a place at the Texas A & M University , he at the college team Aggies then in the Big 12 Conference of NCAA played. It was not until 1996 that the Aggies joined this conference that remained largely unsuccessful during Ress's four-year tenure in Texas. So, at the end of his NCAA career in 2003, Ress was also disregarded in the 2003 NBA draft by the clubs of the highest endowed professional league NBA .

Ress began his professional career in the 2003/04 season with the Italian first division club Scavolini from Pesaro . The team lost the cup final in the Coppa Italia 2004 against Benetton Treviso and was eliminated as fourth in the main round in the play-off semi-final series against the unbeaten team from Montepaschi Siena, which then won the title for the first time. The following season Pesaro entered the ULEB Euroleague created in 2000 as the new highest-ranking European club competition, in which the quarter-final play-offs were reached in the 2004/05 season . There you met defending champion Maccabi Tel Aviv , who was able to prevail after two wins in two games and then won the title again. After Pesaro missed the play-offs in Serie A in ninth place, the club's license was revoked at the end of the season for economic reasons. Ress moved back to the master Fortitudo Climamio in Bologna, where he had started his career for Virtus. However, the team retired in the intermediate round of the 16 best teams of the ULEB Euroleague 2005/06 and lost as the main round first and defending champion also the final series of the championship against Benetton Treviso. At the beginning of December 2006, Ress, who, like in Pesaro at Fortitudo, did not exceed an average playing time of 15 minutes per game, moved to Reggio nell'Emilia for league rivals Bipop Carire. Ress received a larger proportion of the game, but the team missed relegation on the penultimate place in the table because of the poorer direct comparison .

For the 2007/08 season, Ress moved to the master Montepaschi in Siena, who had won his second championship the previous year. In the following six years, when Montepaschi was able to win all the championships, he and the three years older Marco Carraretto were one of the most consistent players of the Italian champions, who could hardly be beaten, even if, like Carraretto, he mostly came off the bench as a substitute with an average playing time of about 10 to 15 minutes per game. In the ULEB Euroleague 2007/08 , Siena reached the Final Four for the third time in the club's history , which ended in third place. In the Italian championship they defended the title after only three defeats in the regular season and one in the final series. In the following season 2008/09 they won after winning the title in the national cup competition "Coppa Italia" for the first time the double with only one defeat in the championship. After two defeats in the championship, Siena won the double again in 2010 and defended it the following year when they again took third place in the ULEB Euroleague 2010/11 . After the former youth and junior national player Ress had already made his debut in the Italian men's national team at the Mediterranean Games in 2001 , he was again in the selection team with Carraretto in the qualification for the 2011 European Championship final tournament in summer 2010 . After successfully qualifying he was no longer a member of the final squad a year later. As in 2009, champion Siena was eliminated against title winner Panathinaikos Athens in the quarter-final play-offs of the ULEB Euroleague 2011/12 against eventual title winner Olympiacos . The financial means of the main sponsor were then largely exhausted and so it was not even enough to participate in the quarter-finals in the ULEB Euroleague 2012/13 . Only in fifth place of the regular season did the team reach the play-offs of the Italian championship, in which you had to go over the maximum distance of seven games in the first two rounds in order to ultimately win the double in the final series for the fifth time in a row . The team then broke up and Ress was one of the few players who stayed in Siena. Finally, there were criminal investigations against club officials because of irregularities, which led to Siena's license being revoked for another season in 2014. Nevertheless, the defending champion reached the final series of the championship again, in which one was only one more victory away from winning the title again after three wins in a row against the main round first and record champion Olimpia Armani Milan . But Milan won the last two games and now Ress left the club after the team was disbanded and moved to Venice for Reyer Umana.

With Venice he won his seventh Italian championship title after the third season of 2016/17 as team captain in the final series against Trento . Ress ended his career at the end of the 2017/18 season with Umana Reyer Venezia by reaching the playoff semi-finals after 622 games in Serie A with 2166 points as well as after 160 games in the EuroLeague and 32 appearances in the Italian national basketball team. In his twenty-year career as a player, he won the Italian championship eight times, the Italian Supercup six times, the Italian Cup five times and the Europe Cup once.

Web links

Commons : Tomas Ress  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Legabasket: Tomas Ress - player profile on the websites of the Serie A ( Italian )
• RESS, TOMAS - Statistics on the websites of the ULEB ( English )
• archive.fiba.com: Players - Tomas RESS (ITA) - Overview of participation in FIBA tournaments (English)
• Tomas Ress Stats - Texas A&M Aggies - College Playtime Statistics at statsheet.com

Individual evidence

1. ^ The Euroleague History Archive - Barcelona 1998: A Triumph for Virtue. (No longer available online.) ULEB , archived from the original on October 8, 2014 ; accessed on July 25, 2014 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ Tomas Ress / EuroLeague Men 1998. FIBA Europe , accessed on July 25, 2014 (English, individual competition statistics). 
3. ^ Giuseppe Nigro: Basket: fallimento Mens Sana, Minucci interrogato 4 ore a Siena. Gazzetta dello Sport , May 22, 2014, accessed July 25, 2014 (Italian). 
4. ↑ Michele Contessa: Basket, Series A: Ress a Venezia: "Qui c'è ambizione". Gazzetta dello Sport , July 16, 2014, accessed July 25, 2014 (Italian). 
5. ↑ Tomas Ress has detto stop: “Vi racconto i segreti di ventanni di carriera”. June 3, 2018, accessed August 10, 2018 (Italian).