The École Mallaig School senior boys volleyball team missed out on a bronze medal at this weekend’s Alberta Schools Athletic Association Provincial Volleyball Championships in Vermilion, but coach Ian MacGillivray says he is proud of the team’s fantastic season.
“They worked as hard as they could during the season to get to where they are,” MacGillivray said. “They truly did improve from our first September meeting to now, and that comes with a lot of hard work.”
The Mallaig Stingers found success this season, picking up the SPAA banner and following it up with a 1A Zone Championship, but the team came just shy of snagging the hardware at the Provincial Championships.
Despite the fact that their starting setter, Marcel Feland, was playing with an illness and had to be substituted with rookie Ryan Jodoin, the Stingers put forth a valiant effort and proved their standing in the province by finishing in the top four.
“It really does hurt when your starting setter is so sick he can’t hardly move,” said MacGillvray. “I don’t want to make excuses for that. My Grade 10 came in and did a wonderful job, and our team played really good volleyball all weekend.”
Feland was frustrated with the timing of his ailment, but was impressed by Jodoin’s performance as substitute setter.
“Jodoin, filling in for me, played great. That’s a hard thing to do when you’re a first year,” Feland said. “Other than that, some things didn’t go our way but maybe it was just not meant to be.”
The Stingers placed second in the group stage with victories over Master’s College, Parkland Immanual Christian and Grand Truck, but were narrowly defeated by the group-winning Acme Redmen in a tiebreaker. The second place group stage finish awarded the Stingers with a berth in the quarter-finals, where they took down host St. Jerome’s Spartans with a convincing 25-19, 25-20 victory.
The Stingers met their match in the semifinals however, as they found great difficulty taking on the Senator Gershaw Gators, a team that defeated Mallaig in straight sets, 25-14 and 25-22. The loss knocked the Stingers out of gold medal contention, but granted them a berth in the bronze medal game.
The bronze medal game saw a spirited rematch between the Stingers and Redmen, but it was Acme who yet again had Mallaig’s number, defeating the Stingers in two very close sets, 25-23 and 25-21.
“(Acme) was a very good team. They were very consistent and didn’t take it easy on us, we had to fight our way through,” said Grade 12 student Matthieu Vallée, adding that while the end was not what the team had hoped for, the overall result is something of which to be proud.
“I had a good full volleyball career, and I’m happy with how we did . . . Every game we improved and we kept fighting to get as far as we could.”
The nail-biting bronze medal game went point for point almost all the way through, but Acme managed to capitalize on a couple of key plays and made use of what little momentum could be gathered in the hard-fought battle to earn the bronze medal.
“(Acme’s) go-to guy was on fire today and we couldn’t stop him. When we played them in the round robin, we were able to stop him more, but today we just weren’t able to get the hands on the ball. Give them credit, they went to the guy that was on fire,” said MacGillivray, adding that the Mallaig team gave it their all to become top four in the province. “That’s all you can ask from your team, to go out and give everything they have on the court, and that’s what they did.”
In the 3A Provincial Championships, the St. Paul Regional High School Saints senior boys and girls teams both came up short of victory.
The boys Saints managed to win one of their group stage games at the tournament in Whitecourt, defeating Queen Elizabeth High School in two sets, but their performance was not enough to grant them a berth in the elimination stages.
The girls Saints went up against some stiff competition in Camrose, and lost all five of their group matches to be forced out of the tournament prior to the elimination stages.
