Many local volleyball players had an opportunity to attend the Alberta Indigenous Games (AIG) last week and one team brought home a medal from the stiff competition.
Ruthann McGinnis organized the teams from Rainy River First Nations (RRFNs). She says when they held tryouts in the spring they had a big turnout.
“So this is the second year we went. This year we held tryouts and opened it up to all indigenous youth in our area. So it turns out, we didn’t want to cut anybody, so anyone that came to try out did get to come. We brought two 15U girls teams, an A and a B team, a 17U boys team and a 17U girls team.”
In addition to players from RRFNs they had players from Couchiching First Nation, Red Gut, Grassy Narrows and a Métis player as well.
Local volleyball coach Terry McMahon runs the 807 Selects Volleyball Club in Fort Frances and he also brought a team of 17U girls to the games in Edmonton.
“This was the same team we went to the Ontario Native Volleyball Championship with [last year], with the exception of two girls, we added because we had a few that couldn’t make it,” McMahon said. “We had girls from Fort Frances, Sioux Lookout and Thunder Bay. It was a mixture of girls I’ve coached and coached against.”
It was a bit of a challenge bringing in new players but the team came together well despite not having everyone there for many practices.
“Because it was a mixed team some of the girls had to try new positions,” McMahon said.
RRFNs has brought teams to the AIG in the past, McGinnis says competition was at a higher level this year.
“The tournament itself, the teams doubled since the last time so we were up against a lot of hard teams,” she said. “We were up against a lot of teams that are fortunate enough to play club volleyball all year long and we don’t have that.”
Despite coming together relatively recently, McGinnis says the teams played well.
“Our boys went 5-1 through the round-robin and it was single elimination in the playoffs and they lost their first playoff game,” she said. “Then our 15U girls A team, they lost in the bronze medal game and they played really hard.”
For many of the players on the RRFNs teams the games were an opportunity to also get a chance to see the city of Edmonton as many wouldn’t get the opportunity to travel otherwise.
“A lot of these kids don’t get to even leave their communities unless there’s trips like this,” McGinnis said. “I think we went to the [West Edmonton] mall four of the nights we were there.”
McGinnis added that the tournament was also a first for many of the players to be involved in a team and travel to a big competition like this as well.
The NWO Dream Team, as they dubbed themselves, had a good opening round-robin, McMahon says, with a wide variety of competition levels.
“It was probably from beginners all the way through to athletes that play high school and club and stuff like that,” he said. “We played five games in our pool and we went undefeated.”
The team would go on to win quarter and semi-final games and then come to face Ontario Elite, their toughest competition from pool play, in the gold medal match.
In the gold medal game, Ontario Elite unfortunately got the better of the Dream Team. With a shorter tournament the matches were best of three rather than best of five and they played two close sets in the final match. Ontario Elite however won 25-20 and 28-26.
“We were pretty fairly matched and I think we just had a tough time getting our offense going,” McMahon said. “We had a couple late rallies but it was really going to come down to who made the fewest mistakes and they played very well in the final match and we were just a little late getting going.”
