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NATIONAL TEAM

‘This is what I’ve been missing’; Brinnen inspired by inclusion to Canadian sitting volleyball team

Jun 4, 2025 | 5:21 PM

KAMLOOPS — Riley Brinnen felt lost and uninspired.

He was appreciative of the opportunity to coach the TRU WolfPack men’s volleyball team last season, but it was not always easy to watch from the sidelines.

Boredom was setting in. The coaching and rehab routine was becoming banal. He lacked confidence. He could sense competitive fire still burning.

“I’d say being around TRU and kind of the old spots was bringing back memories and it was bittersweet, I’d say. Maybe more bitter,” said Brinnen, who joined the Pack in time for the 2021-2022 Canada West campaign. “I didn’t feel good about my body, just trying to compare myself to what I was before the accident. I was like, ‘I can’t be doing this. This isn’t going to be good for me.’”

Brinnen and his WolfPack teammates Owyn McInnis and Owen Waterhouse were involved in a multi-vehicle collision on Nov. 29, 2023, near the TRU campus.

McInnis died, Brinnen suffered spinal-cord damage and Waterhouse sustained a brain injury.

The spark Brinnen needed came in the form of a connection with Reid Brodie, a former University College of the Cariboo Sun Demon who coaches the Canadian men’s sitting volleyball team.

Brinnen was invited to training camp in April in Calgary.

“I was mentally in a really bad place and then, yeah, like day one meeting some of the guys at the airport when I landed, I was like, ‘Oh, this is an awesome group of guys,’” Brinnen said.

“They have different injuries to me, but I still feel like we’re just so close and together and just the whole team aspect again, yeah, I miss that. I was like, ‘Wow, this is what I’ve been missing.’ That filled a huge hole in my life at that point, which made me want to pursue it even more.”

Brinnen said sitting volleyball is mayhem, with new rules to learn, a lower net, less court space, blocked serves and teammates with varying injuries – therapeutic chaos for a lost athlete who found a home on the national squad, recently named a full-time member.

“I always think back to being in the hospital, like fresh at VGH (Vancouver General Hospital), when I was told that I wouldn’t walk again,” Brinnen said. “Obviously, that guy had it wrong.

“It’s not the one I had imagined I would be in as a kid, but the fact I will be playing at an international level in a sport is pretty amazing.”

Brinnen has come a long way since the crash.

“It’s pretty incredible,” Brinnen said, noting he’s taken up rowing and e-biking. “Going from being in a wheelchair, bedbound for quite a while, to kind of learning how to stand again or slowly walking in a pool with poles, to now when I leave the house, I just throw on my braces, get my canes and just go for a cruise.”

The next step is reaching national team standards in an unfamiliar volleyball discipline ahead of his Team Canada debut at a tournament in July in the Netherlands.

Among future events on his radar — the World ParaVolley Sitting ParaVolley World Cup in October in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the Sitting ParaVolley World Championships next summer in Hangzhou, China, and the 2028 Paralympic Summer Games in Los Angeles.

“This whole journey has been kind of whatever I make of it,” Brinnen said. “We’re still in that journey and rehab progression. They usually give like two or two-and-a-half years, but even then, it will be the rest of my life, learning about my body and strengthening it.”