Small, rural school takes provincial high school volley by storm

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This article was published 08/12/2023 (1010 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ÎLE-DES-CHêNES — At Collège régional Gabrielle-Roy, growing the game is a serious business.

August volleyball practices are run by the school’s Spanish and history teacher — Michel Lavergne drives an hour from the cottage to supervise — and they’re also putting in the work during high school season, which runs from September to early December. Many of the kids are also heavily invested in the province’s January-to-May club season.

“We’re a big volleyball school here and we train really hard,” says Max Vermette, the star 17-year-old setter of Gabrielle-Roy’s recently crowned AA varsity boys provincial champions. “We train five days a week.

“All my teammates love volleyball — like really. We do everything volleyball up until December. We’ve been playing volleyball almost nonstop, every single one of us.”

Yet Vermette’s team is not an isolated example.

Gabrielle-Roy, a French-language school that includes a number of small southern Manitoba towns and villages in its catchment area, may only have 275 high school students, but it recently sent a tsunami though the provincial volleyball scene by winning three Manitoba High School Athletic Association titles, including the AA varsity girls and the AAAA junior varsity boys crowns, in a span of five days.

The AA titles were no surprise — the school has been a force at that level for a number of years — but the decision to upgrade the junior varsity boys to the AAAA level and thereby compete against Winnipeg schools with three or four times the student population came just before the October deadline.

“It was kind of on a whim,” says vice-principal Dan Lother, a former University of Winnipeg setter who shares the JV boys coaching duties with Roger Turenne. “We had played in an exhibition tournament at Daniel Mac and at the time Daniel Mac was ranked first and we beat them that weekend two straight, so we started kind of thinking, ‘Like OK, we have a group that could maybe do this.’”

The decision was music to the ears of left side Logan Barnabé.

“Me and my friends are always talking about wanting to play higher up because AA was a bit breezy,” says Barnabé, a Grade 10 student who also plays on Gabrielle-Roy’s hockey team. “We wanted to have more competition and wanted to have more fun out there.”

The scrappy Les Roys had the time of their lives. With only two players taller than 6-feet, they went on to beat the favoured Sisler Spartans in the provincial final with left side Marek Goller and setter Colin Vermette named tournament all-stars and Barnabé earning MVP honours.

“I’ve never seen a team pass and dig like that at that age,” says Lavergne. “They just passed so well. They dig so well. Their serving is consistent and that’s going to cause a lot of damage, especially at that level.”

Similarly, Max Vermette was named the AA varsity boys MVP with all-stars Joshua Bartlett and Zacharie Giroux. On the varsity girls side, Les Roys left side Bethany Carter claimed the MVP prize with teammates Raihanna Laarissa and Katrine Ferguson were all-stars.

Vermette is considering multiple U Sports offers while Carter will be suiting up for the University of Manitoba next fall.

“I’ve grown up around the sport so (playing U Sports) has always interested me,” says Carter, whose older brother Nic, another Gabrielle-Roy grad, is a middle for the Bisons. “(Playing volleyball) is a good way to get out of the house and to take care of your body as well as your mental health. It’s also fun to do. You get to meet a lot of new people and you get to go to a lot of new places.”

Roger Vermette, a math teacher at the school and Max’s dad, says Lavergne constitutes the heart of the program.

“There’s nobody more passionate than that guy,” says Roger Vermette, who shares the varsity boys coaching duties with Lavergne. “He kind of spearheads everything. He started everything and then I joined him a few years after in 2004… And we did that for quite a few years but then when we added other staff and they just happen to have a great knowledge and experience in volleyball.”

Lavergne, a setter during his college days at Université de Saint-Boniface, had a vision to increase interest in the game when he arrived at the school 1994. The varsity boys squad had gone 0-14 the previous season.

“I felt like I was mostly alone there for the first little while — at least 15 years,” he says. “I was doing both the junior varsity and the varsity at the same time and it was exhausting. We’d have good successes, we’d make it to the finals and we’d medal but to get a whole program going, I kept asking my principal, ‘Can you hire somebody else who has an interest in doing it?’ ”

During the intervening years, Vermette, Turenne and Lother joined the teaching staff while also bolstering the coaching ranks.

Nine years ago, Alain Hébert returned to his alma mater to coach the varsity girls and that has triggered an upswing in the female game.

“I think back in the day when I was in high school here we only had maybe one or two club players and now every girl on every team basically plays club,” says Hébert, a volunteer who does not teach at the school. “I think it’s the fastest growing sport here.”

Now, 30 years after he began, Lavergne can oversee a well-oiled machine.

“It was about getting the right people who care,” he says. “I was trying to explain to the administration at the time, I said, ‘You want to get people who want to coach because if they care enough to play in their free time after school and not get paid for it, they’re going to care enough to do a good job in class.’

“That was my view of things. Certainly I was that type of person. I spent a lot of time on my courses but I also put a lot of time after school. It kind of mushroomed and eventually administration started to get it.”

Students and coaches aren’t the only ones taking pride in what Les Roys have accomplished.

“It’s amazing,” says Lother. “We hosted our (varsity boys) AA provincials here this this past weekend and there were a number of parents from smaller towns like St. Adolphe, Ste. Agathe and Niverville saying how proud they are for being from those towns.

“And, you know, we had five boys on the starting lineup of our JV team that won the AAAA provincials from Ste. Agathe, which is which is incredible for a small French community, on the best JV team in the province.”

mike.sawatzky@freepress.mb.ca