By Canadian Press

Pavan shift from indoor to beach volleyball comes full circle at Rio Olympics

Jul 20, 2016 | 8:20 AM

TORONTO — When volleyball player Sarah Pavan makes her Olympic debut next month in Rio, her transition from the court to the beach will have come full circle.

The 29-year-old from Kitchener, Ont., spent some 20 years playing the indoor game but when Canada failed to qualify for the 2012 London Olympics she decided to make the shift to sand.

She teamed with Heather Bansley of Waterdown, Ont., in 2013 and the two head into Rio as Canada’s top-ranked beach volleyball team. 

But the transition for Pavan hasn’t been easy.

She said the shift required retraining her body to move and perform differently than she’d been used to playing indoors.

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“The technical skills themselves are very different,” she said Wednesday at the official unveiling of the Canadian team. “A lot of people say, ‘Well, it’s still volleyball,’ but they’re two different sports.”

Going from a team of many to just two is also taxing on mind and body, she said.

“It’s definitely a humbling sport, especially coming from indoor where you play with six people on the court, everybody has a specific job, to being on the beach where it’s so physically and mentally demanding,” said Pavan.

For the first time since beach volleyball was added to the Olympic program in 1996, Canada is sending a full quota of two teams per gender to the Games. Pavan and Bansley will be joined on the women’s side by Victoria’s Jamie Broder and Toronto’s Kristina Valjas. On the men’s side it will be Chaim Schalk of Red Deer, Alta., and Calgary’s Ben Saxton, and Richmond Hill, Ont., duo Josh Binstock and Sam Schachter. 

Bansley, 28, also missed qualifying for London and said teaming up with Pavan was an important part of pushing herself to the next level.

“It made me realize that my goal of just making it to the Olympics just for the sake of going to the Olympics wasn’t enough,” she said. “That meant investing a lot more in our training and our resources.”

The women finished in the top 10 in every tournament in 2016 and are fifth in the provisional Olympic rankings.

Broder and Valjas, ranked 13th, are in their fifth season playing together. They won gold at the Fuzhou Open in the spring of 2016, becoming the first Canadian women’s team to capture a medal on the FIVB World Tour.

“We started off going on the World Tour and losing every single game,” Valjas said. “To get to where we are now is such a huge accomplishment and we’re so proud of ourselves.”

Beach volleyball is popular in Brazil, and Broder said she and her partner are looking forward to competing in what she called “the best place to play.” The competition will be held on Rio’s famous Copacabana Beach.

“Rio is kind of the mecca of the sport,” she said. “The culture is there, everybody understands the game and fans are very passionate. It’s going to be a very exciting stadium where all the fans are cheering and loving the game.”

Canada has only one beach volleyball medal, a bronze won by the men’s team of John Child and Mark Heese at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996.

Madeline Smith, The Canadian Press