Severstal Cherepovets Women

Before Severstal became a name attached to volleyball, it was a steel plant in Cherepovets looking for a team to carry it, and in 1999 the club took the company's name for its own, growing out of that sponsorship rather than any local playing tradition. It kept that identity until February 2014, when it was renamed Severyanka, though the link to the Severstal sports structure never broke.

The early years produced the club's fastest climb: a Russian Junior Championship in 2001, then the First League title the following season, the kind of rapid ascent that pushed the team into senior competition before it had properly settled into one. The Superliga brought only a single taste of the top flight worth remembering, 10th place in 2011/2012, and Severyanka has since made a habit of winning the Higher League "A" — seven times over, most recently for 2025/2026 — without pushing back up. In 2015, 2017 and 2018 the club won promotion rights outright and chose not to use them.

Natalya Dianskaya began her career here in 2004 and went on to become European champion with the national team; Anna Matienko passed through more briefly, setting for Severstal in 2012 and 2013 on her way to an Olympic Games and a continental title of her own. Neither stayed long, but both left with the club's name attached to the start of something bigger elsewhere.

At the Yubileyny Sports Complex, the fixture that matters most is local: Smena, the city's own youth and reserve side, and the meetings between the two are known simply as the Cherepovets derby. Vadim Pankov now leads the coaching staff, with Natalya Reshetnikova having captained the side through 2025/2026, a team still carrying the steel company's colours long after it stopped carrying the name.