This year’s Camosun Chargers volleyball teams are off to a flying start, but they still have a long and competitive season ahead of them and ambitious goals to reach, according to their head coaches.
Both women’s head coach Chris Dahl and men’s coach Charles Parkinson have high hopes for their teams after the opening weekend of play.
“We want to enjoy what we’re doing,” says Dahl. “But, absolutely, we want to be competing amongst the best for the right to call ourselves the champion.”
Parkinson is even more direct than Dahl about the men’s team’s goals for this season.
“Our first goal is to win the provincial championship, and our second goal is to win the national championship,” says Parkinson. “We’re a competitive team, so we have to aim high.”
The women’s team earned two straight victories in their opening weekend against long-time rivals the VIU Mariners, defeating them for the first time in 20 years. The Chargers won their home game with three straight winning sets, and prevailed against the raucous crowds at VIU with three wins in four sets.
“I think any program in our conference and across Canada looks at matches against VIU as a benchmark,” says Dahl. “For us to handle it the way that we did the past weekend, with control, confidence, and composure from start to finish, was really impressive.”
On the other hand, the men’s team’s opening night fell flat with a loss of three sets in a row against the Mariners on the Chargers’ home turf. They came back fighting on VIU’s campus for a four-set victory and a hopeful overall start to the season.
“Friday night was a rough night for us. We were trying something different. It didn’t really work,” says Parkinson. “On Saturday we tried a different combination and different guys in different positions and it worked really, really well… So to come out with a split where we lost at home, but won on the road, I feel pretty good about that.”
This year’s women’s volleyball Chargers have a lot of experience, boasting three players with five years each in the program. Dahl says that the strong bonds already existing between team members have made it easy for the team to get their skills applied to the game.
“Our student athletes dedicate a tremendous amount of time to honing their craft,” says Dahl. “We feel that we have trained the right way and are going to continue to do that.”
Meanwhile, the men’s team met for a three-day retreat before the Labour Day weekend to build teamwork and freshen skills before the school year, but there’s still a lot of work to do to get this ambitious team where they want to be.
“Trying to find the right combination of players is sometimes a tricky thing. If you look on paper at individuals, they might all have strengths in different areas, but from a competitive point of view it might not be your best combination,” says Parkinson. “We’re trying to find combinations that, when you’re out there, have the most synchronicity.”