Smiles all around now, but there will be a few tears shed
For Canada Games volleyball player Emily Inder, this will be her last big competition, and thinking about it makes her sad
Emily Inder is as cheerful as they come. Her big, almost perpetual, smile tells you that even before you meet her.
But she is going to cry sometime this week. Guaranteed.
It might happen during Sunday’s closing ceremonies for the 2017 Canada Summer Games in Winnipeg, or maybe the tears will hold off at least until Inder and her teammates on Newfoundland and Labrador’s Games female volleyball team go their separate ways at St. John’s International Airport.
But the 18-year-old from Grand Falls-windsor figures it’s likely going to happen whenever her team leaves the court for the final time here in Winnipeg.
It won’t just be this particular team’s last contest. When it comes to high-level competitive volleyball, it will be Inder’s, too.
“I love playing volleyball, and I love everything that’s come with it, but I am done after this. I’ll still play in the (Grand Falls) ladies’ league, but as it stands, nothing like this again,” said Inder, who graduated from high school earlier this year, but has no immediate plans to attend university.
“Thinking about that makes me sad, and I know it will be upsetting. So I’ll probably be bawling my eyes out that last game.”
Inder, who has been playing competitive volleyball since she started junior high school, entered the stream for the provincial team over two years ago.
She survived cut after cut as a long list of potential athletes was whittled down, but just eight months before the Games were to start came a cut that she thought might end her hopes of representing the province in Winnipeg.
“It was November, I was playing in ladies league when I was injured. I tore the meniscus in my (left) knee,” she said.
That led to, as Inder puts it, “a little scope,” arthroscopic surgery to repair the damage, then a dedicated, difficult and as it turned out, expedited, rehab process.
With quite a bit of worrying thrown in.
All that training. Those countless trips to Corner Brook and St. John’s for practices and training camps. Travelling to tournaments in the United States. Her decision to give up figure skating, another sport she loved, to concentrate on volleyball. The innumerable sacrifices of her parents, Dave and Tammy.
Was it going to be all for naught?
The low point may have come during the winter when the Games team was in Chicago for a tourney, and Inder was back in Grand Fallswindsor on crutches and in considerable pain.
“But I couldn’t give up, and I didn’t,” she said. “Usually, you wouldn’t expect it (an injured knee) to get better that fast, but it did and here I am.”
There is still pain, she spends a lot of time with physio and she’s not sneaking up on anyone these days — the knee cracks every so often — but Inder says those are small sacrifices at this point.
“I only have a few more days left to play, and I’m going to make the most of them,” she said.
Head coach Nathan Wareham pointed out that fellow Games player Caroline Walsh is also recovering from a knee injury. But while Walsh, a Gonzaga high school product, had the nearby support of a half dozen teammates living in the St. John’s metro area, the closest ones to Inder were two-and-ahalf hours away — Clarenville’s Emma Hackett and three others living near Corner Brook.
“Being on her own made that (recovery) significantly challenging, but she’s overcome it and she’s brought a life to this team,” said Wareham.
And that smile, the one that will disappear for a little while whenever it is her eyes well up.
“Oh, I’ll cry,” she said. “But anytime after that, when I think of this team, I’ll be smiling.”