2019 has been a crazy year. Volleyball is such a big part of my life and every season we train hours upon hours for one goal: the provincial championship.

For the past three years, the core of my team has remained more or less the same. Every year, the same team has taken us out of playoffs during provincials, a team that we can call our rivals. 2017, lost the final to them. 2018, lost the quarterfinal to them. It’s been heartbreaking. This year, just like the last, we vowed to beat them this season to win provincials, but a new powerhouse team emerged from nowhere. They crushed our rivals every time they played one another, and now we had yet another team to worry about. Even taking a set off this new team was unheard of.

After choking hard at regionals and barely making it into division 1 at provincials, we found out we were ranked last. Dead last. Which meant the first seed, the new powerhouse, was in our pool. We soon became the first to ever take a set off them before losing the game. Thankfully, we managed to make it into tier 1 where we discovered we were playing that team again in the quarterfinal. Meaning, if we lost, the best we could get was 5th. Not even a podium placing.

Then we became the first team to take a game off them. We rode our momentum to the finals, where we faced our rivals. There was no way we came all this way just to lose to them again…

And here we are with our gold medals and the title of provincial champions.

 

Photo by my dad.

 

Beach season came along. I thought it would be easy wins since my partner and I should’ve won provincials last year, had we not performed badly in the quarterfinal against fellow Ducks players. Sure enough, a team we had beaten easily last year had become undefeatable this year. They never lost a single tournament and I ended up losing to them in 3 different rounds of playoffs 3 times with 3 different partners.

I love volleyball endlessly. I will never pass up an opportunity to play, yet I found myself dreading provincials. Dreading playing the sport I live and breathe. I was scared of losing, scared of losing another tournament to the same team. We played the same Ducks team as last year in the quarterfinals again, which really felt like deja vu. Except that this time, we won, to compete against that undefeated team in the semis. I knew that if we could win that game, we could definitely win the final, but I was also mentally preparing to play for bronze. The outcome?

My partner and I’s second provincial championship that year.

 

Photo by Volleyball BC from photos.volleyballbc.org.

 

Hard work got us here, and maybe we’ll be standing on that podium next year too.