The?third?Volley Barbados Championships provided the fans and local coaches with a lot of excitement as well as food for though.
This year’s championships featured the two top local teams, Chargers and Rockets, and the visiting Bois de Boulogne Cavaliers and three time – champions Montreal Carabins out of Canada.
Significantly, Chargers had played throughout 2011 without losing a match. But they lost for the first time on the last day of the year and their woes continued with four losses in five days as they finished last.
A Rockets team, boosted with a number of former and current national players, impressed to take the second spot to Carabins.
Paul White and Leisure Entertainment should be congratulated for once again organizing the championship with the same level of success of Sizzlin’ Sands. The traditional movement from the unavailable Garfield Sobers Gymnasium to the Barbados Community College did not affect the standard of play or the good support of the spectators.
What that move did was to reiterate that indoor sports in Barbados still suffer from the unavailability of adequate indoor facilities 29 years after former Minister of Sport Wes Hall opened the Wildey Gym.
The ground play of the visitors, when compared to that of the local players, showed that our volleyballers, unlike the Canadians, train exclusively outdoors on harsh asphalt.
Just like the national teams, the local sides that will oppose the visitors in the 2012 edition must seek some indoor training prior to the start of the competition. Maintaining the nucleus of the local teams would be key for the development of those teams, but the coaches should follow the example of the Rockets and look to involve all of the top young players.
Our coaches only had to observe the Cavaliers team which looked weak at the start of the competition. They improved significantly every match to place an unexpected third after defeating Chargers in a battle for that position. Sadly, coaching in Barbados tends to cater to helping a better team to win as opposed to making a weak team better.
Barbados can ill afford to miss out on the opportunity of playing five top-quality matches against a full complement of tall, talented players
in one week. That is significant as the top division one teams in the island would play an entire season and only have to push in roughly six out of 14 matches.
The dearth of tall, consistent players means that teams can plan their assault with just one or two clear and present threats on the other side of the net. When exposed to a full roster of threats, the Barbadian players and coaches need to rethink and recalibrate their strategies. Unfortunately, Chargers fell down in attempting that adjustment.
Congrats must also go to former Caribbean MVP Shari Matthews who was voted MVP at the tournament after some solid attacking for the Rockets.
Coach Paul Payne’s ability to extract top quality play from Julia Lewis was a revelation while Anthazia Mason and Shennel Pooler showed that they could still excel at the national level.