The Lakeland Rustlers shook off morning tiredness, and a battle with the flu bug, as they practised Saturday in Lloydminster, the day before departing to Winnipeg for this week’s Canadian college women’s volleyball championship.
Read more: Rustlers on track for back-to-back ACAC titles
After all, the three-time reigning Canadian Collegiate Athletic Association champions are used to overcoming challenges. Just a week earlier, the Rustlers needed a fifth set to defeat the Red Deer Queens in their quarter-final at the Alberta Colleges Athletic Conference (ACAC) championship in Camrose. The Lakeland crew not only regrouped, but didn’t lose a set the rest of the way as they captured a fourth straight ACAC title.
“It’ll help a lot,” Rustlers’ middle blocker Raegan Nicol said about the lessons learned from that early playoff battle. “It’s good to be challenged and it’s good to have to work through things as a group and rely on each other.
“If we can work through our previous weekend at provincials together, moving into this week at nationals, that’s a good sign for us. The team is feeling good. We are excited. You can feel this group is buzzing with the excitement of, ‘We’ve punched our ticket to nationals, and we are going to do our very best at that tournament.’ ”
The eight-team national championship tournament runs Wednesday through Saturday (March 11-14) at Niverville, Man., near Winnipeg. The Rustlers went up against the host Providence Pilots in quarter-final action Wednesday evening. In semifinal play Thursday night, the Lakeland-Providence winner meets the champion of a quarter-final between the Humber Hawks of Toronto and the Mount Allison Mounties of Sackville, N.B.
“I’ve been here for four years now, and I don’t want to be anywhere else,” said Nicol, a history major in a collaborative program through Lakeland and Athabasca University. “This is the place for me. I’ve really found this group is a family. Being a part of this team just means so much to me, and I couldn’t be happier.
“We want to go all the way, pursue our goals and play at the highest level possible, and really see our own hard work pay off.”
The Rustlers showed that grit when they gutted out their five-set victory over Red Deer in their first match at the ACAC championship.
“I feel like I was very nervous during the game, but I know we’ve had years of training, and training together,” said Rustlers’ graduating right-side hitter Avery Bates, the MVP of the conference tournament.
“So, I was like, ‘You know what. We play the way we’ve been training, and hope for the best,’ and it ended up working out.
“We also had three players that hadn’t played in a playoff game, as starters, so I feel like you have to be almost like a calming front so that they feel good.”
Bates supplied that kind of stability, and more, in what Lakeland coach Austin Dyer described as an all-world performance.
“It definitely feels pretty good, coming from him,” Bates said about that praise. “I mean, we’ve known each other for six seasons, so I’ve had a lot of time with him. Honestly, it means the world.”
The road to Lakeland often begins in small communities like Bates’ hometown of Acme, Alta., and Nicol’s native Coalhurst, Alta., near Lethbridge.
Both players played high school volleyball with their local teams.
In her case, the 21-year-old Nicol said she was a relative latecomer to volleyball. She didn’t play at the club level until she was 16 or 17.
“I’m six-foot-one,” she said. “I think that’s how I got into that (middle) position when I was younger. You’re the taller athlete, so you’re going to go into those taller positions.
“I played for my small-town high school, and then I played about one-and-a-half years of club volleyball. I was late to the sport, you could say. I was pretty lucky to get here on the Rustler team.”
The Rustlers considered themselves fortunate to find gym time Saturday in Lloyd. With the Lakeland gym busy hosting the ACAC men’s basketball championship, the volleyball team went to E.S. Laird Middle School, where Dyer has been a longtime teacher, running the physical-education program.
“We are just so lucky that we get to come to the community gym and play and practise today, because our gym is being used for basketball this weekend,” Nicol said. “I’m just grateful to get to train every day.
“Getting in here today at 10 a.m., it’s a bit early, but we get out of bed, arrive here and work.”
The previous two nights, the volleyball Rustlers were cheering on fellow Lakeland teams in playoff action at two Lloydminster venues. On Friday evening, Bates said, she managed to watch both the women’s hockey Rustlers and the men’s basketball team.
Read more:
