Sporting Madness

Here's one of my stories from this weekend: check out the tournament site for more! In the men’s 18U division, one of the 40 teams is not like the other 39. The 16U Ottawa Mavericks, a team composed of players two years younger than most of their competition, were a last-minute addition to the tournament after another team withdrew unexpectedly. “Due to the withdrawal of one of the Ontario teams that was driving, we had a vacancy,” Tournament Competitions Chair Brenda Willis said, adding that an unfilled spot would have meant a time-consuming process of redoing the tournament draw, difficult due to the late date of the withdrawal. “We were quite fortunate to have the 16U Mavericks step up and fill the vacancy, even though they’re two years younger. It’s a tremendous opportunity for them to improve, because they’re playing up. Hopefully, when they go out to their nationals in a week, it will all seem easy because the hitting will be lower and softer.” Perhaps predictably, the Maver...

Apologies for the lack of posts around here lately: I'm currently serving as the Communications Coordinator for the 2008 Canadian Open 17U/18U volleyball championships , which means a lot of writing, editing and dealing with local media (yes, I've gone to the dark side) and not a lot of time to do anything else. We're working 6 a.m. to 1 a.m. days trying to keep everything going, and it can be a little difficult, especially given the scope of the tournament. Anyways, this is a pretty cool tournament with a lot of interesting stories, and it's also related to university volleyball: there's over 100 university coaches, scouts and recruiters here from Canada and the States to evaluate potential new talent for their programs. To give some background on the tournament, one of the lead-in stories I wrote is posted below: you can check out my other pieces on the tournament website . I'll try to check in with an update here whenever possible. There's also good tourn...