History-making Maverick Marshalls storm USA Volleyball Nationals, strike gold

By Keiran Gorsky

It was the first day of the USA Volleyball Boys Junior National Championships. Eric Lapner and Eli Griffith of Ottawa’s Maverick Marshalls were standing in front of the men’s bathroom at the Minneapolis Convention Center, hands intermittently shoved in their pockets or folded behind their backs.

This was their moment in the limelight with professional volleyballer Gage Worsley, one of the founders of Out of System Volleyball — an American content creator with more than 130,000 followers on Instagram.

“We’re gonna win this,” Lapner declared into Worsley’s tiny lavalier. “You can come back to us, Court 29, 3 p.m., with our gold medals.”

He proceeded to look straight into the camera lens, apparently realizing this had nasty karmic potential.

“Are you gonna post this and then show us after the loss?” Lapner asked.

“Well, then don’t lose,” Worsley grinned, draped in stars and stripes from the waist down.

There was an unflinching confidence about these Marshalls, one of three 17-and-under squads at Ottawa’s Maverick Volleyball Club and the first in the club’s 40-year history to ever compete in the top division of the U.S. nationals.

It might have seemed strange, given their 21st-place finish in their age bracket at this year’s Canadian championships two months prior. They finished that tournament, their biggest up to that point, with a dismal 1-6 record.

But it was a fundamentally different team come the July 3-6 event in Minneapolis, MN. Coach Evan Lockwood never doubted the talent on the court, even when results weren’t going their way.

Initially, there was some doubt about whether the team would be able to travel to the competition at all.

The Marshalls received an invite as one of the top 36 teams in North America, but Lockwood recalls that USA Volleyball gave them just three days to respond. After an emergency meeting with the players’ parents, the team decided the chance to be Canada’s lone representative in the 17U division was an opportunity they simply couldn’t refuse.

“I love taking on challenges, and so does my team,” signals Lockwood, a former NCAA volleyball and tennis player at McKendree University in Illinois. “My team loves to make history… and prove people wrong.”

The Mavs set up a GoFundMe and hosted a series of exhibition tournaments, recruiting club alumni, University of Ottawa athletes and even former professionals in an effort to scrounge up funds. The team managed to recover roughly a third of their total travel expenses.

Once it was clear they actually could make the trip, Lockwood’s sights moved onto the team itself. The Marshalls had had a successful regular season and a respectable fifth-place showing at provincial championships in April. Their faltering at nationals, Lockwood decided, had mostly to do with everything intangible.

“My big focus was self-reflection, of how I prepared the team physically, mentally and emotionally and really made sure that I [learned] from my mistakes,” Lockwood indicates.

Practice over these two months became a means to instil a new mentality. Drills were often tedious exercises in mental fortitude, Lockwood outlines, all for the purpose of replicating high-pressure scenarios at pivotal match junctures. One drill, called high ball continuous, simulates the capacity for individual players to make and break points, sets and entire matches.

“If, at one point, somebody fails, everyone restarts, not just the one player,” Lockwood explains.

Lockwood’s methods were a difficult sell at the beginning of the season. In addition to these repetitive all-for-one gambits, he took great pains to prevent needlessly high-risk maneuvers when simple solutions were more than adequate. At one point, he outright forbade his team from attempting jumping spin serves.

“They thought I was crazy,” Lockwood recalls.

With the stakes higher than ever before, though, his rigid discipline seemed to finally stick. Drill success rates, which Maverick’s coaching staff tracks religiously, began to tick up. When those simulated scenarios emerged in competition, players were ready.

One player Lockwood feels grew tremendously over the course of the season is outside hitter Ridha Faisal. By the semi-finals of the tournament, Faisal’s kill rate was approaching an astonishing 80%, all without a single error. Careless mistakes and lapses in concentration seemed all but off the table.

“I felt like the entire team was calm,” Faisal highlights. “I think that’s because we knew we had the game under control.”

Faisal partially attributes their mental state to another pressure inoculation drill, where the team would simulate being several points down on a hypothetical set point. It’s a situation they found themselves in early in the tournament, where they overcame a 24-20 deficit to ultimately best Arizona’s Momentum Volleyball club in straight sets.

Without a set dropped in seven wins over teams from Connecticut, Arizona, Wisconsin, Hawaii, Indiana and two from California, Lockwood wasn’t feeling overly nervous two days later, when Canada’s lone 17U representatives squared off in the finals against Rage Volleyball Club from Ripon, California. The Marshalls captured the first set by a score of 25-22. In the next set, it the Mavs who were the ones up four points with the tournament on the line this time.

On match point, setter Lukas Weyand scrambled to dig the ball out and propel it towards the net. It fell into Faisal’s path. Opposing blockers flew up with their arms flailing, but they left a small gap. Faisal made no mistake.

The clip lingers on USA Volleyball’s Instagram page, the Canadian challengers dominating the American nationals.

“They called their shot!” the post reads, referencing the earlier comments made by Lapner, who was named tournament MVP and an all-star alongside teammates Griffin Brown and Alexi Raymond Tsai.

Part of Lockwood still can’t believe the result. He had competed in the tournament growing up in the United States, finishing only as high as 10th, even playing alongside athletes now active on the American men’s national team. For these Marshalls, though, the result was never in doubt.

“We wanted to win,” Faisal underlines. “We knew we were going to win.”