Chaos spike into inaugural season

Justin Seward
Times Reporter

 

The Strathmore U13 and U14 club volleyball team is getting prepared to start their inaugural season, and the players are very excited to get it underway.
The team was established in early January by two coaches, Vito Peraino and Greg Appleyard, who co-coached volleyball at Holy Cross Collegiate earlier in the year.
“We coached the Grade 7 and 8 HCC team together this year and I think we’ve seen how much enthusiasm, and how much those girls appreciated and enjoyed themselves,” said Appleyard. “We just had discussions on if it was worthwhile trying to continue on with the program and the only thing I wanted to make sure is that we had a lady coach on the bench as well. Lindsay Hall from Crowther said she’d be happy with work with the system, when she committed then we started to put out feelers to see who would be interested.”
The interest was high and the coaches had no choice but to make two teams out of the turn out they got.
“I think 27 girls come out to try-out and our ideal situation was that we were going to pick a travel team and have a developmental team. But because of how many people we had try out, we decided just to do practices where we had a U13 with some developmental and then a U14 team,” said Appleyard.
The team wants to compete at a higher caliber of volleyball, but know they will have to rely on the experienced players.
“We’ve already entered the U14’s in nationals. We’re trying to be competitive at a provincial level but in your first couple of years it tough to compete right off the bat because some of these girls have been playing for the last few years,” said Appleyard. “We’re going to set up some exhibition games with these other towns, Brooks, Airdrie and Calgary club teams. We’ll probably compete in two to three tournaments and provincials.”
The cost is $400 to play for the travel team because of various expenses.
The team will play in some exhibition games in Strathmore throughout the year.
Appleyard wants to thank all the people that are volunteering to run the club as he said it could not be run without the countless hours that they are putting in.