Ottawa’s Maverick Volleyball Club received a national honour at the end of January, being named one of the first three officially accredited clubs in Canada.
Volleyball Canada’s new accreditation program is in its first year and Ontario was the only province able to announce accredited clubs in 2014. Next year, four other provinces are expected to join the program with the eventual goal of having accredited clubs in every province and territory, according to Volleyball Canada’s domestic development director James Sneddon.
“It’s definitely an honour for us to be recognized,” says Maverick co-president John Nguyen. “Basically it says we have a good government structure, a sound development system, a good gender balance, coaches who are qualified and we also have programs in all genders and ages.”
The club is also venturing into new areas of the city, primarily through elementary and middle schools, in an effort to recruit more athletes. This year, for the first time, Maverick started a development program at the Glebe Collegiate Institute, home high school for many Centretown students.
“We try to have our programs as central as possible so athletes can come from anywhere in the city and not just one particular area,” says Nguyen.
Nguyen says the Maverick will now try and improve on the categories they were not able to meet. Although they do not yet know which categories those are, he assumes it is gender balance that needs improvement.
He says there are almost three times more girls playing the game than boys, but at the coaching level those numbers are reversed.
“It’s quite the challenge,” he says. “I think if we solved that problem the rest of the country would be happy with us.”
The club currently has 1,100 kids involved in their development program, but Nguyen says the biggest challenge is competing with other sports such as football and hockey, but the recognition of accreditation will only help draw in more athletes.
“It’s a very good marketing tool,” he says. “We tend to get an influx of males coming in at the (under 16) age group when they find out they aren’t going to be (professional hockey players) and they switch to volleyball.”
To become an officially accredited, a club must meet five mandatory categories and seven of ten optional categories. These categories were set by the Ontario Volleyball Association to develop the categories and they must be approved by Volleyball Canada. Accreditation is awarded on an annual basis, so clubs must maintain the high standard they have set for themselves.
“That’s the whole goal of the program. By recognizing the clubs that are doing an extraordinary job, we would be able to set a standard that more clubs could aspire to and raise the whole level of volleyball in Ontario,” says Ontario Volleyball Association’s technical director Jason Trepanier.
Volleyball Canada and the OVA are hoping that accredited clubs such as Ottawa’s can lead by example to raise the standards for coaching and developmental quality on both a provincial and national level.
“It’s to encourage clubs that perhaps aren’t aware of some of the best practices that the top clubs are doing or to see some of that criteria and start working towards them,” says Sneddon. “(The goal is) to improve the quality and the accountability of club programming across Canada.”