Two Mavs teams add volleyball national crowns

For the Longhorns, it was a great time to play their best volleyball of the year after a season where they rarely cracked the top tier at tournaments and were eliminated in the round of 16 at the provincial championships. “I’m still in disbelief,” says coach François St-Denis, who teaches at Louis Riel high school. “It was a great group of guys, but throughout the year we ended up being on the wrong side of the fence, so to speak. They really came through in this tournament.”

The Canadian East championships (separate east and west tournaments are held prior to the 17U level) provided a contrast to the rest of the season as the Longhorns wound up on the happy side of several tough battles en route to nine victories. “It was like they fixed all their problems at the same time,” St-Denis explains. “I saw a group that was very tight and believed in themselves this weekend. The guys executed phenomenally well.”

Béatrice-Desloges student Bruno Lortie was named MVP and was selected to the tournament all-star team along with Patrick Goulet and Patrick Roy following their 26-24, 25-19 win over Scarborough’s Crush in the gold medal game, but the Longhorns had little time to savour the moment. Two courts over, the Mavericks 15U Ambush girls were still battling for their championship.

The Ambush cruised through the competition’s first eight matches – 21 points were the most an opponent scored against the Mavs in any given set – but the Durham Attack Black were giving them plenty of trouble in the final.

The teams had split the first two sets with 26-24 scores, and the Mavericks trailed the deciding frame 6-1. But that was just about the exact moment the Longhorns arrived and unfurled their championship banner court-side. “We were down a couple of points and then the boys came with their banner and it gave us that little boost because we wanted to do the same,” recounts 15U girls’ tournament MVP Véronique Caya, who was joined by Samuel-Genest high school student Vanessa Hanrahan, and Garneau’s Nathalie Drouin as all-stars. “They started cheering us on and from there it went better and better.”

The Ambush climbed out of the early hole, but still faced match point, down 14-12. They earned a side out, and then coach John Spack brought in the youngest player on the squad, Rebecca Roy, to serve.

The move paid off, so he tried the same thing again by substituting Jane Baerg into the serving position with the score tied 15-15. She served twice, with the second clipping the net and dropping into Durham’s court to set off a big celebration with all the Mavs teams. “It was a very, very stressful situation for the girls, but it certainly set them up well for the future in those situations – they did a marvelous job,” notes Spack, whose squad also became the first Mavs team to claim a provincial title in April. “It was centre-stage, noisy as all heck. I couldn’t hear myself think and the girls had a hard time hearing me – it was a very magical environment.”

The 15U and 16U titles came on the heels of the Mavericks’ 18U boys victory on May 3 in Ottawa. The trio of gold medals came in the fourth year of the Mavs’ high-performance initiative – a program that includes three practices a week, two or three conditioning sessions, video analysis, seminars on topics such as nutrition and life balance, and the guidance of a sports psychologist, who joined the Mavs for the trip to Moncton. “We put in a lot of time and we addressed all the elements, and I guess that’s proof that it’s a winning formula,” St-Denis says, noting the club also lost three-setters in the respective gold and bronze medal finals of the 16U and 14U girls’ categories. “It was an amazing weekend for the Mavs. We had three teams in the final – it’s unheard of almost.”