UMMC Yekaterinburg have been crowned champions of the 2024/25 Russian Women’s Basketball Premier League. In the final series, the Ural team defeated Nadezhda from Orenburg three times in a row: 91-83 and 78-59 at home, and a decisive 88-56 win away on May 1. This marks UMMC’s third consecutive title and the 18^th overall in their history.  

The Yekaterinburg players had an impeccable season (the bronze medal series is still ongoing). UMMC won the national Super Cup, the Russian Cup, and now the Premier League title. In the first stage of the championship, where all 11 teams played each other twice, the team from the Ural capital lost only once in 20 games (a tough away loss to Enisey Krasnoyarsk). In the second stage, where the top six teams played two more games against each other, UMMC went undefeated. The playoff run, starting from the quarterfinals, was also flawless - with eight straight victories.

The secret to UMMC’s long-standing success lies in their exceptionally high level of organization - both in terms of sports management and marketing. In fact, the latter is sometimes even more crucial. For many years, the Ural team has led the league in home attendance, and this season saw a truly outstanding achievement by Russian standards. In the spring, a brand-new, state-of-the-art, multifunctional arena was opened, becoming home to both the Avtomobilist hockey team and the UMMC basketball players. The first game of the finals against Nadezhda drew a crowd of 10,345 spectators, while the second game attracted 7,738. Such impressive numbers are rarely seen even in other national leagues across Europe or in the EuroLeague.

Today’s UMMC team is led by one of Russia’s top coaches, Dmitrii Donskov, who has been the head coach since 2022. The competitive roster is a well-balanced blend of the country’s best homegrown talents and carefully selected foreign players - European and global stars of the highest caliber - recruited specifically by position, and without limiting playing time for the Russian athletes. The team’s winning traditions, rooted in the Soviet era of women’s basketball, have been preserved and passed down for many years by Olga Korosteleva (Barysheva), a two-time Olympic champion (1976, 1980), who remains on the coaching staff.

The abbreviation UMMC stands for Ural Mining and Metallurgical Company. Throughout the Soviet era and part of the Russian period until the early 2000s, the team was known as Uralmash. For a brief time, it was called Uralmash-UMMC, but then the connection to the heavy machinery plant was eventually severed. UMMC has won the EuroLeague six times and could have claimed even more continental titles if not for Russia’s suspension from official international competitions.

In the 2024/25 Premier League season, UMMC played 38 games, winning 37 of them. In each game, point guard Viktoriia Tretyakova took to the court alongside her backcourt partner, Alexandria Bentley, an American who leads the Belarus national team and is not counted toward the foreign player limit. Also consistently featured was Zhosselina Maiga, a frontcourt player with extensive experience on the Russian national team. Anastasia Olairi Kosu, a 20-year-old forward and one of the brightest prospects in Russian basketball (she debuted for the senior team at just 15 years old), and Eva Lisec, a Slovenian center who has competed in four EuroBasket final tournaments, have each appeared in 37 games in the current Premier League season.

In the 2024/25 season, Maria Klyundikova (maiden name - Vadeeva), Anastasiia Shilova, Elena Beglova, Kseniia Levchenko, Maryia Papova (Belarus), Megan Walker (USA), and Jovana Nogic (Serbia) also played the majority of games for UMMC. These twelve players formed the core of the team - exactly the number allowed on the game-day roster for each match. Additionally, four players from the farm team made one or two appearances in the league: Alena Burmakina, Sofia Golubeva, Polina Gusakova, and Ekaterina Soloveva.    

Here are UMMC’s leaders in key statistical categories (all averages per game): scoring: Bentley – 12.2 points, Klyundikova – 11.3, Nogic – 10.8; rebounds: Klyundikova – 7.3, Lisec – 5.1, Kosu – 5.1; assists: Tretyakova – 3.8, Bentley – 3.7, Levchenko – 3.5. Levchenko and Shilova demonstrated near-perfect free-throw accuracy, converting at 91.3% and 90.9%, respectively.

Head coach Dmitrii Donskov was assisted by Denis Sevastjanov, Olga Korosteleva, and Alexandr Lisichkin. The team’s medical staff included doctor Ruslan Latypov and physiotherapist Igor V’yukhin. The club’s general manager, Maxim Ryabkov, has guided the team through many winning seasons.

Maria Klyundikova, a second-generation basketball player and center who led the Russian national team at the 2015 European Championship at the age of 16, and is now a young mother, was named MVP of the playoffs. Joining her in the All-Star Five of the championship’s final stage were her teammate Bentley, and foreign players Unique Thompson and Ashley Beverly from Nadezhda.    

Source: https://rg.ru/2025/05/01/reg-urfo/basketbolistki-ekaterinburgskogo-ugmk-prazdnuiut-18-e-chempionstvo...