Dan Falloon
Watch out, Dryden Eagles.
The coaching staff of the Muskie junior girls’ volleyball squad is working to end the Eagles’ reign of dominance at the NorWOSSA level in part by extending training past the high school season.
One way to do that is by forming a club team, which is exactly what Amy Wilson-Hands and Jason Cain are doing at the under-14 level.
“Years ago, the Dryden Eagles started a volleyball club like we’re doing right now, and it just has benefited their high school tremendously,” explained Wilson-Hands.
“When Jason Cain and I started coaching the Muskies two years ago, we just saw how much better the Eagles were than Kenora or Fort Frances,” she noted.
“We sat down one night and said, ‘What do we need to do to get where Dryden is?’ And that’s how we came up with the volleyball club.”
Dryden has won every NorWOSSA senior girls’ crown since the 2001-02 season and every junior girls’ title since 2003-04 (the senior team brought home a silver from OFSAA in Perth earlier this month).
While the local program isn’t set to rival Dryden’s quite yet, Wilson-Hands is keeping her fingers crossed that being part of the team will encourage a new level of dedication to the sport to help reach that level.
“Dryden trains year-round, so it’s hard,” she admitted. “We don’t have that level of commitment yet, but we’ll get there, I hope.”
Wilson-Hands felt a major advantage of the club team would be that the Muskies’ junior squad wouldn’t be forced to play catch-up when the NorWOSSA season kicks off in December.
If the players already have figured out the fundamentals of the sport coming into the season, then valuable practice time can be used to fine-tune more specialized skills.
“We wanted to do something to better the youth coming into the high school so that when they got to high school, we weren’t starting to teach them the basics. They already knew it by that time,” Wilson-Hands reasoned.
She noted 27 girls tried out for the club team, with 15 ultimately cracking the squad—10 Grade 8 players, four in Grade 7, and one in Grade 6.
The team is practising twice a week leading up to a pair of tournaments in May (in Portage la Prairie, Man. and Hibbing, Mn.)
While volleyball is the major focus, the training also is going to feature a significant fitness component, with personal trainer Terry McMahon offering to help on that side of thing.
“He’s volunteered his time to come on Tuesdays to try to get the girls into shape, which is awesome, so we don’t have to do that,” enthused Wilson-Hands.
“He’ll be working on their cardio, their jump training, strength training, agility,” she explained.
Both the Muskie girls’ junior and senior volleyball teams will be hard-pressed to improve on their NorWOSSA silver medals they earned this past season, but Wilson-Hands noted the true transformation will start to make itself clear in the seasons to come as the hours of training start to stack up.
“[It’s] not so much this year it will make a huge difference, this year coming up, but in the next couple of years is when we’ll really see quite a change in Muskie volleyball,” she remarked.
“That’s exciting, it’ll be neat to see,” she enthused.
Wilson-Hands added that a beach volleyball program in the summer is a possibility if there is enough interest.
