Vakifbank 2 Women

The Vakıfbank Sports Palace sits on Vakıf Sok. in Üsküdar, a hall built for volleyball rather than adapted to it, and since it opened in January 2017 it has held both the club's senior side and its reserve team under the same yellow-and-black colours. With 2,900 seats, it is not a venue built for crowds watching a development squad, and Vakıfbank II rarely fills it; the team's matches draw a fraction of the attention given to the parent club a few metres away.

That parent-club shadow is the point of the team. Founded in 2007 as VakıfBank Güneş Sigorta II before the sponsor's name dropped away, it exists to feed players upward rather than to win anything itself, and in the Turkish Women's Volleyball 1st League it has gone without a title since its first season. The league placing is not the measure anyone inside the club uses.

The measure is who left. Derya Cebecioğlu spent three seasons there from 2014, then moved up to collect titles with both Vakıfbank's senior team and the Turkish national side — the clearest run any player has made from the reserve side to the top. Tuğba Şenoğlu, now playing under the name Tuğba İvegin, passed through more briefly the following year before going on to represent Turkey at the Olympics.

In Group A of the second tier, the matches that matter locally are against Istanbul's other reserve sides, Fenerbahçe Medicana II and Eczacıbaşı II — fixtures between academies rather than title rivals, watched by scouts more than supporters. There is no separate identity for the team beyond the "II" attached to its name; it borrows everything, down to the colours, from upstairs.

Most weeks, though, the hall in Üsküdar stays quiet for these games, its rows of empty yellow-and-black seats a reminder of whose building this really is.