The Plamondon Volleyball Club Pipes U18 boy’ s team brought home silver medals from the Premier #3 volleyball tournament in Calgary last weekend.
The Plamondon Volleyball Club Pipes U18 boy’ s team brought home silver medals from the Premier #3 volleyball tournament in Calgary last weekend.
The team’ s assistant coach, Monique Ulliac said it was a big win for a team from such a small area and a great weekend for team building.
“We won silver in division two, which is the first time for the club and the team,” said Ulliac. “So we’ re very thrilled.”
The team previously won bronze medals at Premier #1 in early February but this time around, not only did they place higher but against very tough competition.
“We played three higher ranking teams on Saturday and beat them all,” said Ulliac.
During one particularly close best-of-three game, she said the team won their first match 33-31, lost the second 25-27 and won the third 17-15.
“So they were real nail-biters, just point by point by point,” she said. “They were thrilled with how they did, just ecstatic.”
Unfortunately the only game the team would lose was the final one. But while Ulliac said a bad call by the referee was a contributing factor to the loss, the players were still good sports about the matter.
“There was a bad call on our winning point, the ref called it back,” she said, adding that the recalling of the point then lead to a tie and eventually the loss. “But they accepted the call and were classy about it.”
Ulliac said the weekend’ s tournament acting as great bonding experience for the players to come together as a team. She thinks volleyball is a particularly great example of a team sport because it requires players to learn to work together and build trust among teammates. While the team is already tight-knit and familiar with each other, Ulliac said their hard work is really starting to pay-off with the team seeing considerable improvement recently.
“The base of the team has been together for four years,” she said. “So we’ ve worked really hard for four years to build the team, it’ s great to see that now it’ s starting to pay-off.”
Currently the Pipes sit in eleventh places out of 20 U18 boy’ s teams in the province. She thinks this is a great sign considering the size of the area the team is from compared to teams from large cities.
“We are the smallest town bringing in a team,” she said. “With such a small population basis, it’ s satisfying seeing that we can still compete with teams from large areas”
Between sportsmanship, team building and their ability to stack up evenly against big city competition, Ulliac sees the weekend as a win for the team.
“Some people say you lose for silver but I think we still won,” she said.
The next tournament for boys will be provincials in Edmonton April 22 and 23.
