VBall champs

March 15, 2010

Dinos volleyball: National champions

The volleyball teams celebrates its championship.

Seventeen long years after their last appearance in the national title game, the University of Calgary men’s volleyball team made the most of their opportunity by defeating the Trinity Western Spartans 3-1 to capture the CIS national championship Sunday night in Kamloops, B.C. (25-22, 25-21, 23-25, 27-25).

It was the Dinos’ first trip to the national tournament since 2003, and they climbed to the top of the podium the hard way—entering the tournament as the sixth seed, then defeating two conference champions in Dalhousie and Alberta before getting the last laugh on a Spartans team that had defeated them in the Canada West semi-final last weekend in Edmonton.

The win is the fourth men’s volleyball title in the University of Calgary’s history after previous wins in 1982, 1989, and 1993. It is the 41st CIS championship in the Dinos’ history across all sports and the third in 2009-10, following the men’s and women’s swimming victories in February.

It is also the first championship for a men’s team sport at the University of Calgary since the 1995 Vanier Cup, and it came from a group that hopes to re-establish the storied history of the Dinos men’s volleyball program.

“This is the best, this is the most fantastic reward for a group of kids that committed to a program that wasn’t very good four years ago,” said Rod Durrant, who led the Dinos from a 4-14 record to the national title in just his fourth season at the helm of the program. “They bought in, and they’re young men that grew a lot in four years, and I couldn’t be happier for them.”

“There’s no better way this could have ended for us,” said Oleg Podporin, one of sixth fifth-year seniors on the team. “We’re a really tight group of guys. When we lost to Winnipeg (last season in the opening round of the Canada West playoffs), we started 6 a.m. morning workouts the next day and nobody complained. Everyone worked hard over the summer, and since the first day this season everyone has been giving it 100 per cent. We played as a group of brothers tonight.”