When Battlefords Volleyball Club first began, it had enough interested kids to form two teams.
That’s normal for a new organization just starting out.
Now, just six years later, the club is looking to have 14 teams compete in the upcoming season.
How has the club seen such rapid growth in such a short time?
“[We have] a lot of involved parents, wanting to get their kids involved in the sport,” club president Paul Sarsons said at the organization’s first large scale summer camp on Saturday afternoon. “We have a board that is very, very entrenched in the community so we have superintendents in the school divisions, we have teachers, we have bankers, we have people that want to see this community develop. So they’re willing to put the time in to get this to where it needs to go.”
Ideally, in order for the club to get ‘where it needs to go’, Sarsons, who also coaches the senior boy’s Vikings team at North Battleford Comprehensive High School, needs to be able to knock off the big guns at the high school level.
In order to do that, he needs kids to fall in love with the sport of volleyball from a young age, which is why BVC runs an “atomic” program for kids in grade school.
“In order to win [at the high school level], I need athletes who have been playing for a long time because I have to compete with Prince Albert and Swift Current and Saskatoon,” Sarsons said. “I can only do that if I have kids who love the sport and want to get better without me having to force them into it, which never works out.
“We want kids who love the sport just for the sake of loving it, not for the sake of just being somewhere and doing something.”
At the summer camp, 12 kids from Grades 1 to 5 took part in the ‘atomic camp’, learning the basics and fundmentals using badminton nets in the school’s small gym, while 29 kids from Grade 6 right through high school took part in the other half of the camp in the main gym.
“[Atomic] is [for them to] learn the sport and have fun immediately,” Sarsons said. “Try to get them hooked so that they want to continue playing. It’s all based on game play and enjoying the sport, rather than drilling them through a ton of skills that are boring.”
The skills learned at the atomic summer camp are just a slice of what they would learn in the atomic program, which is offered by BVC in the winter for kids not old enough to compete on club teams yet. That program will be run by Shari Dueck this season, who had previously coached the club’s 16, 17 and 18-U female teams.
Meanwhile, the main camp on Saturday was for kids already playing at a competitive level, according to Sarsons. This way, they continue working on good fundementals and get more reps on the court, right ahead of the high school volleyball season.
BVC also brought in Rene Quintal from Prince Albert, who is the president of Prince Albert Volleyball Club and coaches at St. Mary’s high school, to help instruct as well.
“[Quintal] is one of the top coaches in the province,” Sarsons said. “We brought [him] in…to make sure they’re getting the best instruction that we can provide.”
Try-outs for the many BVC teams are not until late November and early December.
After the teams are selected, practices start in January, at which point they go full throttle until May, which is when nationals are.
This year they are being held in Edmonton.
“We’re going to try to send every single team we’ve got to nationals,” Sarsons said.
nathan.kanter@jpbg.ca
On Twitter: @NathanKanter11
