OLDS — For just over a week, 28 teens from across Canada have been training hard at Olds College for a chance to make the Canadian U17 girls volleyball team.
If they’re successful, they could end up competing internationally in Peru this summer.
The Olds camp ended on Sunday.
Now those 28, split into two teams, will compete in the Canada Cup, a national competition being held in Calgary.
After that, the final cuts will be made to create the 12-member team that’ll compete in the Fédération Internationale de Volleyball U17 girls world championship, which will be held Aug. 17-24 in Peru.
Former Olds College Bronco’s women’s volleyball coach Sammy Fraser (she has just taken a job with the University of Calgary) served as associate coach during the camp in Olds.
“This is our entry pathway for Team Canada women's volleyball,” Fraser said during an interview with the Albertan. “This is our youngest age group that competes.”
Fraser said most of the athletes invited to the camp came from Alberta, B.C. and Ontario, with one or two coming all the way from Nova Scotia.
None were from Olds or surrounding area. The closest came from Calgary.
Fraser said Olds College was chosen as the place to hold the camp because, as head coach of the Broncos program, she was familiar with the place.
Also, it has everything organizers and players needed – an on-site residence, a great gym, classrooms and dining services.
“It's an integrated program,” Fraser said. “We do a lot of mental performance sessions, video analysis, just game planning and preparation, kind of sessions like that.”
Fraser was asked for her thoughts about the girls who attended the camp in Olds.
“I mean, they're super talented kids,” she said.
“A lot of them are only 15,16 years old, so it's pretty exciting to get them all in the gym together and kind of see what the future of women's volleyball looks like at the national team level.”
However, Fraser said it’s one thing to have the talent and drive to play international volleyball, but it’s another thing to be successful at that level.
“Just trying to understand the next level of the game, that’s always the biggest jump,” she said.
“When you go from national competition to international, it's just like a higher volleyball IQ, a different speed of the game.
“So seeing whether or not this really young group can adapt to just the speed and the level of play on the world stage will be kind of the biggest question.”
A red versus white game open to the public was scheduled to be played Saturday.
