Undefeated N.B. girls volleyball team 'devastated' it can't compete for national title
A group of undefeated female volleyball players from Moncton trained for two years, won every tournament, outperformed older athletes and became the best in New Brunswick. But it wasn't enough to earn a shot at the under-15 national championship this year.
Volleyball Canada regulations place the Cyclones in the third tier for the nationals in Alberta this week. The best the team can finish is 17th.
Coach Jon Clinch said team members trained hard to fulfil their dream of playing at the tournament's highest level, or within the top two tiers.
It wasn't an unrealistic goal. The team won the Canadian under-14 championship last year. Progressing to under-15 this year, the team went undefeated and won the Atlantic title.
"Nobody can believe that a provincial champion doesn't get to compete for a national championship," Clinch said in an interview. "On top of the fact that we won the national championship the year before."
Volleyball Canada's ranking system allocates points to each province. The Cyclones say they maxed out the number of points they could have earned over the past year for New Brunswick and still don't qualify for the top two tiers at nationals.
Clinch said the points system is hard to understand, but the team didn't expect to receive the ranking it did.
"It was a surprise to us because of the fact that we won the nationals the year before and the resume we had this year," he said.
Volleyball Canada told the Cyclones that guidelines are based on a weighted point system. It allots points based on a team's ranking going into provincial championships and its rank coming out.
Each age/gender also has a unique point scale based on the past six to 10 years of data of how each province or territory performed at previous national championships.
This is where Clinch wants more information. He wonders how it is possible that a team ranked 12th in Ontario gets to play in the top two tiers, but a team ranked first in New Brunswick doesn't?
"We understand that seeding can be complicated to explain, given the many factors involved," Sandra de Graaff, Volleyball Canada's director of domestic competitions, said in a statement to CBC.
"Cyclones couldn't have done anything to change their situation, as seeding is base on historical data, as per the current guidelines.
"The 15U girls category has 312 teams participating from across many parts of the country, so this NB team (15UG Cyclones) is still ranked well ahead of the majority of the teams in this category."
De Graaff said New Brunswick has not placed higher than 14th at the under-15 girls level, earning that rank in 2015.
The appeal
When Clinch found out how the Cyclones were ranked, he and executive director Amy Clinch, who is also his partner, appealed the decision. Volleyball Canada denied it, stating all seeding rules were followed.
"No information was provided to indicate that seeding was performed incorrectly or outside of the National Seedings Guidelines," Volleyball Canada wrote in its decision.
Amy Clinch said she understands that Volleyball Canada didn't break its own procedures.
"What they're failing to see is their rules and policies are not just and fair," she said.
"I find it heartbreaking, especially for these kids because they trained so hard," she said. "It's hard for the coaches, it's hard for the parents. A lot of money was invested, you know, it's in Alberta. It's just really, really frustrating the fact that New Brunswick is just off the radar."
One athlete stayed up crying all night, Amy Clinch added, when she realized there was no chance her team could play at the higher levels. She said for some of the girls, it's the first time they're experiencing barriers in sports.
"They're just devastated, devastated," she said. "There's already a lot of barriers in sports for girls, for girls sports, and I just feel like adding another one is just so heartbreaking."
Jon Clinch said the athletes are still planning to represent New Brunswick as best they can. But he said the team will never know how well it could have done at a higher level.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
National Post
27 minutes ago
- National Post
Players failed to confirm woman's consent, Crown says as closing arguments end at Hockey Canada trial
'Myths and stereotypes' about sexual assault shouldn't have had a place at the trial of five 2018 Team Canada world junior hockey players, but the Crown on Friday said they have taken centre stage. Article content At the end of the prosecution's lengthy closing argument, Crown attorney Meaghan Cunningham said the defence teams' strategies relied heavily on attacking the credibility of the 27-year-old woman who says she was sexually assaulted in a London hotel room seven years ago – instead of addressing evolving legal standards around consent. Article content Article content 'Relying on myths and stereotypes to discredit sexual assault complainants is an error of law,' Cunningham said to Superior Court Justice Maria Carroccia. Article content Article content The Crown has argued the men who had sexual contact with the woman inside Michael McLeod's room at the Delta Armouries hotel in London on June 19, 2018, did not obtain the legal consent and should be found guilty. However, Cunningham said the defence leaned on victim-blaming, painting the woman – who was 20 at the time – as someone who 'abandoned restraint' and offered sex to the men in Room 209. Article content Cunningham said it is a stereotype that 'women signal their sexual availability by drinking and going out and getting drunk and dancing and flirting on the dance floor, that all of these things make it more likely that she also chose to engage in sexual activity with the men back at the hotel. Article content 'It's not only a myth, but I submit it is not what happened here on the evidence.' Article content McLeod, 26, Carter Hart, 26, Dillon Dube, 26, Alex Formenton, 25, and Cal Foote, 26, have each pleaded not guilty to sexual assault. McLeod has also pleaded not guilty to a second charge of sexual assault for being a party to the offence. Article content Article content The case surrounds a night of partying in London on June 18 and 19, 2018, when the Canadian world junior team was in the city for a Hockey Canada gala and golf tournament celebrating the team's gold medal months earlier. Article content McLeod and the woman met at Jack's bar on Richmond Row and returned to his hotel room for consensual sex. What happened after is at the heart of the trial. Article content The woman has testified that when she emerged naked from the bathroom, she found a group of players in the room invited by McLeod for sexual activities. Article content Along with being drunk, the woman said she had a trauma response and felt her mind separate from her body to cope with the demands of the men who directed her to participate in several sexual activities. The Crown says the woman was vulnerable, outnumbered and went along with what happened. Article content The defence has pointed to the woman as the aggressor and instigator of the sexual activity, first masturbating in front of them while on a bedsheet spread on the floor, then begging and taunting the men for sex. Some took her up on her offers and insist she consented to the activities.
Globe and Mail
an hour ago
- Globe and Mail
Football, Father's Day and the fleeting moments of parental joy we all dream of
I didn't think the Toronto Argonauts would ever mean as much to me again as when I was younger. They'd been there as a bond with my father, a semi-ironic shared passion with my friends, an opportunity to connect with Canadians from outside my Toronto bubble while drinking unhealthy amounts of beer at Grey Cups around the country. But my dad died, and life got too busy for my friends and I to get to every game together, and family responsibilities and financial pressures and fear of worse hangovers meant the Grey Cup trips pretty much stopped. And yet here we are, and I don't know if I've ever been more excited for an Argos home opener. Fitting that it falls on Father's Day weekend. Because what's reignited my passion for the CFL is the football journey onto which it's sent my nine-year-old, and what that's unlocked in me, and the idyllically old-fashioned little slice of father-son bonding it's giving us. When I first took Alec to see the Argos at BMO Field, a couple of years ago, my expectations were not sky high. The only sport he'd really embraced was basketball. Football is not an intuitive game that's easily graspable for kids, especially in an era of constant digital competition for their attention. I figured if we stayed much past halftime, without resorting to excessive bribery via stadium snacks, we'd be doing well. Instead, we made it through the whole game. And another one. Then another. He didn't get every nuance of the sport immediately, which was more than fine by me, because it meant I could give fatherly explanations that flexed my knowledge of something he was interested in. But he knew a big play when he saw one, and to make noise when the Argos were on defence, and even during blowouts he insisted on staying in our seats to the end, because that was what real fans did. For my part, I saw anew the singular appeal of CFL football that had drawn me in decades before. Here was a game sufficiently big-time that Alec could watch elite athletes make highlight-reel plays in front of tens of thousands of people, and sufficiently small-time that he could go down to the players' tunnel and jostle with other kids for autographs. Less corporate, more boisterous and chaotic than a Leafs or Raptors or Jays game, out in the open air, it was pretty magical through a boy's eyes. And it was cheap enough that I could take him often. Dad Bods explores the science of fatherhood – and brings good news When the Argos ended their 2023 season by losing a playoff game they were expected to win, he was the right level of disappointed. When they won the 2024 Grey Cup, he was so eager to go to the championship celebration downtown that I couldn't resist pulling him from school. It was, I know, to some extent a product of my own steering. I wouldn't have pushed him to embrace Canadian football if he hadn't warmed to it initially. But once he did, I wasn't above letting him stay up way past his bedtime to go to the odd evening game or saying yes to buying Argos merchandise more often than I should have. And I didn't go out of my way to disabuse him of the notion that they were as beloved a team as any in this city. But if I was the one who'd led us to that point in our shared football experience, Alec took us into the next phase of it, if not entirely intentionally. Over the winter, he got wind from a couple of friends at school that the Toronto Flag Football League, sponsored by the Argos, had a recreational division in our part of town for kids his age. He was eager to give it a try, and with some manoeuvering we got him into the spring season last-minute. (For the uninitiated, flag football is basically touch football, but with defenders needing to pull pieces of Velcro off ball-carriers to end plays.) When I brought him to the field, two things quickly became apparent. One was that the league, which takes over high-school football fields and has kids play width-wise across them, is more organized than I expected. It not only has referees and sideline spotters, but staff tracking stats for each player – receiving yards, interceptions, defensive metrics like deflected passes – updated on its website. Somehow this adds up to both a dream come true for kids who've watched pro football, and a welcoming environment for newbies. The other was that Alec had landed on the one team with confusion about who was coaching it, which was a possible explanation for losing their first game 63-0. Although he still said he'd had fun, a whole season of that threatened to put a damper on the experience for him and a bunch of other eager kids. So I took a deep breath and offered to help coach the rest of the way. It's hard for me to fully explain how far outside my comfort zone this was, despite my CFL love. It's not just that, with very limited experience playing organized football myself, my play-calling abilities were limited. (Fortunately, I wound up coaching alongside another dad who'd played university football.) The bigger obstacle was that, while I like to think I'm a pretty fun dad to my own kids, I'm not naturally one of those extroverts to whom other people's kids gravitate. Trying to direct nearly a dozen nine- and 10-year-olds to play a complicated team sport in front of their parents would've sounded to me, until this spring, like a nightmare. This is not where I tell a heroic tale of how, together, we turned it all around and triumphantly marched toward the championship. The team finished the regular season last week with three wins, seven losses, and a tie. (And the rival team that walloped us the first week, a juggernaut that never lost, subsequently beat us 56-0 and 49-7.) Our daughter's arrival filled us with joy. Becoming fathers had never been a given But Alec and his teammates visibly improved. A player who initially looked uncertain on the field scored a game-winning touchdown; another whose first couple of attempts at quarterbacking went poorly started to figure it out. They all appear to enjoy football as much or more than when the season started, they seem to like each other, and maybe they've discovered a few things about themselves. I sure have, about myself, which is a gift when you're well into your 40s. It turns out that, compensating for my limited technical expertise with decent communication skills and a possible excess of positive reinforcement, I might actually be decent at helping kids – even those who aren't my own – manage their emotional highs and lows and grow together. From the sidelines, I've done my best to treat Alec like every other kid, even as I've seen some nascent leadership skills in his combination of competitiveness and sportsmanship. But I've relished our conversations about each game's highlights, what worked and what didn't, on the drive home and for days after. Between games, in the long daylight of late-spring evenings, we've found ourselves tossing the ball around outside, playing mini-games with other local kids who join in. To the slight amusement of my wife, and possibly a few other parents who know me well, I've become a Neighbourhood Football Dad. All of this may reach its pinnacle this weekend, when Saturday morning's flag-football playoffs – which every team makes, and where we might be able to pull off one more win before running into the juggernaut – will give way to the Argos' opener in the afternoon. I'm very aware that it may not last. Tastes change, as our kids like to say when we prod them to eat something they purportedly liked previously, and the younger you are the faster it can happen. Alec's Argos enthusiasm could wane if they have a bad season or two, or if kids at school convince him the NFL is what counts. His on-field career could come to a crashing halt anytime, too, if he decides another sport (or no sport) is for him; a flag-football craze that's swept through his friend group for reasons I don't fully understand could easily be replaced by something else. At a certain point, as he approaches teen-hood, his dad's involvement could become a bug rather than a feature. I'm also not going to pressure Alec's brother, five-year-old Felix, to follow in his football footsteps – even if there were early signs of enthusiasm at his first Argos game last fall. But living in the moment is something I'm always trying to encourage my kids to do, and it's probably time to practise what I preach. No matter how close and loving your relationship with your children, it can feel like a constant struggle to stay connected. I do my best to understand and embrace Alec's tastes in anime or Roblox video games or memes he's heard about from his friends, even as I try to police them. But particularly when it involves mediums that didn't exist when I was his age, there can be a distance. Then something comes along that fits how you vaguely pictured parenthood before the kids were born. Something more analogue, maybe, more transferable between generations, that you can nurture and share. You know it's giving you memories you'll keep the rest of your life, and your kids will too, but first you try to savour it and make it last as long as possible. So I'm signing up to coach again when flag football resumes in the fall. And I'll be buying tickets for all the Argos games we can go to this season. I'll be quietly thanking them, every time I'm in the stadium, for what they've helped us share. Alec won't be thinking about the game that way now; it's not how kids work. But one day, he just might.
National Post
2 hours ago
- National Post
All four Canadians make the cut at U.S. Open: 'Everyone is getting beat up'
OAKMONT, Pa. — All four Canadians will see the weekend at the U.S. Open after a gruelling two days at Oakmont. Article content Nick Taylor and Taylor Pendrith are leading the way among Canucks at four-over par, seven back of leader Sam Burns. Article content Article content There weren't many pars on Pendrith's scorecard as the big-hitter from Richmond Hill, Ont. made five birdies and seven bogeys in high-event round of 72 at Oakmont. Article content 'It was nice to make some putts today. I made one birdie yesterday and it was with a wedge so I did not putt any birdies in yesterday,' he said. 'It is scoreable if you put the ball in the fairway, but if you miss the fairway you are in full scramble mode.' Article content Pendrith's five-foot par putt on the 18th hole did a full horseshoe of the hole before being rejected and sending him into a tie with 2023 RBC Canadian Open champ Taylor at four over. Article content 'I hit a nice putt and got a full 360 lip-out,' Pendrith said. 'It can happen here.' Article content Five-time PGA Tour winner Taylor had the best Canadian round of the day on Friday, a one-over 71. Article content Mackenzie Hughes shot a 72 to finish 36 holes at five over. The Dundas, Ont., native is still recovering from a stomach bug he suffered through at last week's Canadian Open, but has the claim to fame of making it through two days at Oakmont without making anything worse than bogey. Article content 'On a course like this bogeys are easier to accept, it's when you compound them with a three-putt or maybe you wedge out and then miss the green,' he said. 'You have to be disciplined after that first mistake, and you have to concede, if you will, and then limit the damage on the next one.' Article content
