High school star set to play for UBC
BOYS VOLLEYBALL: Lake Country’s McCarthy wastes little time working his way into national team program
Fynn McCarthy has made volleyball his athletic pursuit of choice.
Yet if the senior from George Elliot Secondary in the Okanagan Valley town of Lake Country had to list another as his fallback sport, it might well be the playground game of leapfrog.
Playing just his second full season of high school volleyball with the double-A No. 5-ranked Coyotes, McCarthy has enjoyed such a meteoric rise in his sport that even before the current campaign had begun in the fall he had made the Canadian under-18 youth national team a full year ahead of schedule at the tender age of 16.
Only one other B.C. player, Victoria-Oak Bay’s 2016 Head of the Class honouree and UBC freshman Nick Mickelberry, made that team and Mickelberry is a full year older than McCarthy. Last week, McCarthy announced that next fall he too would be headed to the Point Grey campus.
“It’s very rare,” says Chris Frehlick, a former Thunderbird and Canadian Olympian who now coaches McCarthy and the rest of the Coyotes’ senior varsity team. “He is doing things in just a few short years that all of the kids I have coached can’t. You just don’t see this very often.”
Blessed with height and size at 6-foot6 and 200 pounds, McCarthy’s route to the game was detoured by a broken collarbone he suffered in September 2014 while playing midget rep hockey for the Winfield Bruins.
“I went in for a kind of awkward bodycheck and got hit and I was out for three months,” remembers McCarthy, who at the time of the injury was just beginning to realize that his talents lie on the court, not on the ice. “The whole time I was hurt I was thinking of volleyball, not hockey, and I was just itching to get back on the court.”
For McCarthy, who had sampled the game for six weeks in a spring league as an eighth-grader and then focused solely on hockey in Grade 9, the collarbone injury was ill-timed enough that he got no more than a month of court time in his Grade 10 high school season.
The Kelowna Volleyball Club put him on their ‘B’ team that spring, yet not too soon after he made the B.C. team and was extended an invitation to train with the national youth program.
After his first full high school season as a Grade 11 in 2015-16, he improved so much that by late spring he was one of 12 athletes across the country selected to that national team.
And in June, just 18 months after returning from his collarbone injury as a near-total volleyball neophyte, he started for his country at middle blocker and helped Canada finish second at a high-performance invitational in Florida.
“I’ve just tried to absorb as much as I can as fast as I can,” admits McCarthy. “Spiking, jumping, hitting the ball; all of that comes pretty naturally to me, but there are other skills like the passing and the setting that are a little more difficult to me.”
They are, however, understandable shortcomings for someone who will not have played two full high school seasons until the completion of the Big Kahuna B.C. boys championships, which run Nov. 30 to Dec. 3 at the Langley Events Centre.
“The defence, the ball control and back-row play still need a lot of work before he will be a starter at the university level,” says Frehlick, who helped UBC to a national title in 1983 and later suited up for Canada at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. “But he is making good progress.
“There is no doubt that he is the best middle attacker in the province. His frontcourt skills are at a pretty high level.”
For his part, McCarthy knows that he has come a long way in just a couple of short seasons, but he’s also aware from being around Frehlick that his talent is still just a lump of clay in need of constant refinement.
“I just want to keep improving,” says McCarthy, who doesn’t turn 17 until Dec. 4. “The one thing I don’t want to have happen is my game to plateau because my goals are high. I want to make the (senior) national team one day and I want to play in the Olympics.”
For full boys and girls volleyball rankings, look for the High School icon at provincesports.com.