Image credit: TRU Athletics

By Chad Klassen

TRU WOLFPACK

Despite challenging rookie seasons, WolfPack volleyball players feel year off will serve their development well

Nov 19, 2020 | 6:30 PM

KAMLOOPS — The WolfPack are having a fun day, not your traditional volleyball but what they call smash ball, allowing for one bounce on the floor.

With no season, and no games on the horizon, interim head coach Casey Knight wants to keep practices somewhat light to keep the players motivated.

“The toughest part about this season is not necessarily the competition, it’s the fact there is none, and it’s just that mental grind,” said Knight, who’s taken over for Pat Hennelly who is on leave this season. “Part of volleyball is that injuries happen and so we’re going to get guys who roll their ankles under the net, but when you have nothing to specifically train for, you have no ‘okay, we’re going to Kelowna, we’re going to compete in the Okanagan, and there’s an outcome to this game,’ that becomes very difficult.”

For first-year players on the WolfPack, the first two months at TRU has been different than your usual university freshman season. Without games, it’s more challenging to gauge your progress.

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“It would show where our level’s at,” said first-year player Reilly Podovelnickoff. “It would show where I’m at. It would definitely help us a lot.”

Knight added, “Not only has it been difficult in the sense the whole team has nothing to really work for, but how do you know if you’re working towards a spot on a starting position if you don’t have a set starting line-up because you don’t have those competitions.”

Coach Knight also knows how COVID and isolating from people outside the team mean for the rookies.

“For the first year of your university life, a lot of it is the social life,” said Knight, a player with the TRU WolfPack from 2011-2015. “When you arrive at university, you’re outside of your comfort zone, you’ve left your family. You’ve left your friend group, so you need to be out there making friends. Now again with COVID, they can’t go out. They can’t make those new friends and they can’t enjoy what university life really is.”

Back on the floor, there is one positive for the first-year players who have one more year to get used to this new level of play.

“It definitely helps me a lot because I get to practice a lot more and understand different practices and play against guys my own height or that are much faster than I am,” noted Podovelnickoff.

Fellow WolfPack rookie Matthew Hamilton from Lethbridge added, “Definitely having a stress-free year as far as games go. All we do is work on practices and train, and it’s just a good time to just focus up on what you’re trying to accomplish this year — and that’s just the little tools.