Mac confident its time will come
As has been the case for six straight springs now, when McMaster’s players walked off the court after their final game of the season, they were wearing a medal from the national volleyball championships.
Not the one they really wanted, but still a bauble that testifies to an elevated level of consistency unique in this country.
Sunday afternoon, the Marauders eviscerated the second-seeded Alberta Golden Bears in three sets (25-14, 25-16 and 25-22) to claim their fourth bronze, to go along with two silver in that time.
“The gold medal goes to the champions and it is well-deserved,” head coach Dave Preston says. “But the bronze medal goes to those who persevere.”
Translated: It goes to the team that best shakes off disappointment. Which he understands well, because the Mac side that left the court less than 17 hours before was a thoroughly disconsolate group.
After winning the first set of Saturday’s semifinal against the two-time defending champs from Trinity Western University — and turning up the volume in the packed gym from heavy-metal-concert loud to heavy-metal-concert-inside-a-jetengine loud — the Marauders jumped out to a 10-6 lead in the second and appeared to be headed toward history.
However, that lead evaporated. As did a set point in the fourth set that would’ve pushed the match to the limit.
Suddenly, the home side had been painfully eliminated by their now-perennial nemesis — for the fourth-straight season. It was a gut punch, an eye poke and a groin kick all wrapped up in one sour package of misery.
They didn’t want to talk much about it, but losing to the same opponent timeafter-time-after-time gets really tiresome.
Could the coach even quantify the level of disappointment in the dressing room when that match was over? “On a scale of one to 10? Eleven.” Mostly because his side was so close to slaying the dragon that’s been hurting them for years. And by geographical extension, tormenting the entire country for half a century.
Including Sunday’s championship by the University of British Columbia — the Thunderbirds swept an uncharacteristically sloppy TWU side that had been razor sharp the day before — western teams have won 46 of the 53 titles since they started contesting them. No Ontario school has won since 1968.
Why the domination? As Preston pointed out days before the tournament opened, western schools committed to volleyball long before everyone else.
It meant getting a massive head start on building great programs. Even today, many of those schools still pour more resources than other places into the sport.
Even more-impactful is the scholarship situation. All conferences other than the OUA can offer full tuition and fees to athletes. In Ontario, $4,500 is the max. That lets other conferences lure top recruits from across the country — four of the six members of the all-tournament team played for TWU or UBC, yet only one hails from B.C. — while offering little incentive for hot prospects to head here.
While Ontario is developing great players, that hurts.
“There’s no doubt that we’re running into the wind,” Preston says. “We’re going to continue to run, but we’re always running into the wind.”
Even so, he says the gap is closing. Based on how convincingly his side handled a really good Alberta team Sunday, you could argue it has been closed. On every school but a couple, it seems.
“It’s getting tighter,” he says. “It’s not closed yet, but it’s getting tighter. I’m going to keep going at this until we can close it up permanently.”
That would be defined by gold. Considering how close Mac came that outcome seems inevitable. Especially with all but one of their starters returning next year and for at least two more seasons after that.
It may take the kind of perfect match UBC played to do it, but it’s bound to happen some day. This consistently excellent program that’s come so close so often —
and showed such character by playing so well Sunday after such heartbreak Saturday — is bound to slay that dragon one day.
“This team will get that gold
medal,” says Brandon Koppers, the one fifth-year Marauder. “It’s just a question of when.”