Modrica

Boro Jović remains the only volleyball player Yugoslavia ever sent to the Olympics, and he did it wearing the yellow and blue of a club from Modriča. Modriča had turned him into a champion a year before Moscow 1980: the 1978/79 title was the first won by a Bosnian side in the old Yugoslav league, and it came from a club founded twelve years earlier, on 8 March 1967.

That win set the pattern the club has followed since — punching above the size of Modriča itself. When Bosnia and Herzegovina built its own league after the breakup, OK Modriča Optima won it in 2005/06 and added the national cup the following season. Within Republika Srpska, the club has rarely had to look up at anyone: nine league titles and nine cups, spread from the mid-1990s through to 2022, against Borac Banja Luka as the standing rival.

The women's side, ŽOK Modriča, had its own moment near the end of Yugoslavia, finishing runner-up in 1991/92 on the eve of the war that would split the league apart for good.

Matches are still played at SC Modriča. It is not a ground that draws attention on its own, but it has been enough to carry the club into the modern game: Aleksandar Okolić came through Modriča before moving into Serbia's national team, and he was on the gold-medal side at the 2019 European Championship in Paris — a reminder that the pipeline Jović opened four decades earlier never really closed.