By Dan Plouffe
If you’re a parent, you know there’s nothing like a good snack to lift kids’ spirits. Frank St-Denis is a parent, and also a past Canadian junior national volleyball team assistant coach, and he’s never appreciated the value of bananas, oranges and granola bars as much as last weekend at the OFSAA ‘AA’ boys’ volleyball championships.
When St-Denis was at the 2016 world junior championships, he remembers Team Canada’s therapist always had an eye on ensuring players were optimally fuelled during long matches. That’s a lesson he’s carried forward, and one that proved particularly pivotal as his Louis-Riel Rebelles played in their seventh match within three days at the Nov. 21-23 high school provincials in St. Catharines.
After a perfect 5-0 record on the first two days of competition, Louis-Riel survived an exhausting semi-final battle with a Sudbury-area school, L’Horizon.
The Rebelles had been up 2 sets to 1 and built an 18-9 lead in the fourth set before their opponents launched a wild comeback to win 25-23. St-Denis wasn’t sure if his team would be able to overcome that massive momentum swing, especially when they fell behind 8-5 in the deciding set, but middle Owen Lafleur fired three aces as part of a six-serve run to spark a 15-12 comeback win.
“That five-setter took a lot from us, physically and mentally,” St-Denis reflects, although the ride was far from over yet.
In the same-day championship game against top-seeded St. Mary’s of Owen Sound, Louis-Riel again had a 2-1 lead, but St-Denis “could see that we were starting to fade” when he called timeout trailing 17-12 in the fourth set, he recounts.
“I just threw the bag of snacks there and told the guys to eat for the whole timeout,” St-Denis explains. “Nothing was said, just chomping down food, and some guys even went back on the court still with their mouth full.
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“I was really doing that only for (players to regain energy for) the fifth set, because they need time to digest for (the food) to really have an effect on them.
“But what I didn’t account for – I think there was a pretty significant mental impact. They suddenly forgot about what had happened before, focused on the food, and maybe it had a placebo effect or something, but … we actually stole the fourth set.”
With Louis-Riel’s 24-26, 25-22, 25-22, 25-20 victory, St-Denis earned his sixth career OFSAA title as a coach (along with several more medals), although he says the championship celebration never gets old.
“It was pandemonium. Everybody was jumping around. There was some crying,” describes St-Denis. “I’m super proud of the boys.”
The leader of the sports-études volleyball program at Louis-Riel hadn’t coached a senior-level team since a run of three OFSAA ‘A’ gold and one silver with his sons playing from 2016-2019, but decided he’d like to return since his retirement from teaching is approaching.
“The only thought I had is: I don’t want to go down without a fight,” smiles St-Denis, who coaches the team alongside Devon Von Eicken. “I’m the same as I was 25 years ago. That flame has not faded. It’s natural for me to make sure that everything is the best that we can do it.”
When he told the players in his program last year that he’d like to coach the senior group, St-Denis immediately added that he wouldn’t be doing it “half-hearted.”
So, the Rebelles held nine weekly team practices in the spring, on top of their daytime training for class, so that they could hit the ground running in the fall.
“This group was so good in terms of commitment,” St-Denis highlights. “I always knew we had the firepower (to win). We were just error-prone as well. Kudos to (the players). At OFSAA, they cleaned it up, and we didn’t do that too, too much.”
One player who shared in that evolution was Louis-Riel’s star William Gimbert, a Team Ontario player. Gimbert had been a middle all the way through with the Maverick Volleyball Club, but he switched to left-side with the Rebelles at the suggestion of St-Denis, who is a big believer in players trying different positions in high school play to improve other parts of their game.
“Only about a month ago maybe did we see some really dominant performances from him” free of errors on top of his eye-popping physicality and vertical leap, St-Denis signals. “Three or four times this year, he was a machine, he was carrying the team, and I would say that happened a couple of times at OFSAA as well, where he took over a match, and it was just phenomenal.
“I’m super happy for him, because that’s just a testament of how much hard work he put into this, and he didn’t waver. He had the belief.”
St-Denis also salutes the Ottawa Mavericks for expanding their programming in recent years. The Mavs used to only have one or two male teams per age group, and that probably would have meant only three Rebelles would have been playing club volleyball, St-Denis outlines, but with the advent of the Mavs’ regional training centre model, Louis-Riel had nine players with club experience.
“You see the result of that in terms of the quality of the school league. It’s really impressive,” St-Denis says, adding that it’s not only clubs fuelling the rise, but also many very good local high school coaches. “It just gives us a big edge. In the matches where we were down a bit at OFSAA, the guys didn’t freak out at all, because they’d experienced that this year at some point.”
The Samuel-Genest Laser also reached the quarter-finals at ‘AA’ OFSAA before falling to St. Mary’s, while West Carleton and Franco-Cité also made it to the quarters at the ‘AAA’ provincials, with Franco taking the bronze.
On top of the experienced volleyball players, the Rebelles also had several multi-sport athletes on the squad.
William Bélanger, who previously won OFSAA volleyball silver with Béatrice-Desloges in 2022, changed his focus to golf at Louis-Riel. He’d been a left-side player with the Mavs earlier in his career, but switched to setter when he came back to play volleyball in his final season with the Rebelles.
That team-first sacrifice was crucial in giving Louis-Riel a balanced offence, St-Denis notes, adding that not everyone would have accepted critiques from teammates on how he needed to adjust and improve his sets like Bélanger did.
After the championship win, Jody Dérival, whose main sport is basketball, passionately shared with teammates how special an experience it was for him, and how special a team they were.
“It was pretty cool, those testimonials,” St-Denis underlines. “I told the guys, ‘You’re probably going to be thinking about this for many years to come. It’s just a special moment, and now it belongs to you forever.'”
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