NORTH Vancouver's Leanna Gildersleeve settled old scores both personal and collective in leading her Vancouver Island University Mariners to a gold medal victory in front of an ecstatic home crowd at the Canadian Colleges Athletic Association championships March 8-10.
The Sutherland grad's trip to the top of the Canadian college volleyball world started way back in 2007 at Edmonton's Grant MacEwan University with a West Coast kid joining the high-powered prairie program looking for gold. The Griffins were coming off a national championship win and Gildersleeve wanted in on the action. She got it, almost.
"My second year we ended up coming second at nationals," Gildersleeve told the North Shore News. "That kind of left a bitter taste in my mouth."
Gildersleeve left Grant MacEwan after that loss and spent some time traveling before coming home to the North Shore to earn certification as a personal trainer while also working as a coach for the BCO Volleyball Club. Two years passed but the itch to play at a high level never went away.
"I really wanted to go back to school and play again because I felt like I was missing something from my volleyball career and I definitely wasn't ready to give it up," she said. "When I left Alberta I never thought that that was going to be my last year. I always thought that I was going to go back at some point."
A cousin playing for VIU pushed Gildersleeve to consider heading to the island and Mariners coach Shane Hyde joined in the recruitment. The Mariners had lost to Grant MacEwan in that national tournament back in 2009 and Hyde remembered that it was Gildersleeve who did a lot of the damage. Knowing that VIU was hosting the 2012 national tournament, Gildersleeve signed up to play with the Mariners last fall. But the transition from personal trainer back to power hitter wasn't as easy as she'd hoped.
"The beginning was kind of hard, my head wasn't quite in to thinking like that - I had two years off, not really in that mindset of being an athlete," she said. "It took a lot of time the first couple of months, I definitely butted heads a couple of times with my coach. We smoothed things out and it just got easier as the year progressed. The girls were very helpful with giving feedback - we push each other very hard throughout the year in practices and in our workouts so it was a great atmosphere to come back into."
That hard work led them to the Pacwest provincial
championship game which VIU won with Gildersleeve earning tournament MVP honours. The best teams in the country then descended on VIU's Nanaimo campus for the CCAA national championship tournament. The Mariners, buoyed by a raucous home crowd, made it all the way to the championship final against the Mount Royal University Cougars from Calgary, a fitting matchup for a number of reasons. One year prior, with Gildersleeve looking on as an interested spectator, the same two teams met in a controversial national championship match. In the fourth set VIU appeared to win match point but as they danced and screamed on the court the referee overruled the linesman's call and awarded the point to Mount Royal. The Cougars came back to win the fourth and fifth sets to snatch the title.
As for Gildersleeve, she had her own history with Mount Royal. Her two years in Edmonton featured numerous grudge matches against their provincial rivals from Calgary.
"I know them quite well from playing in Alberta," she said. "I've hated - well, not hated - but I've had a rivalry with them in Alberta that definitely translated to (the 2012 final)."
VIU plays in an old, small gym and it was crammed full of spectators for the championship game, including members of the University's men's team who painted themselves blue and screamed their heads off all night.
"It was just like a buzz in the gym," said Gildersleeve. "My girls on the court, I couldn't even hear them. There was no point in talking because you couldn't hear what was going on, whether someone was calling the ball. It was an unreal atmosphere to play in. . . . It helped a lot. It got in the heads of our opponents at some points."
The Mariners dropped the first set but raced back to win the final three, setting of an incredible celebration.
"It was just an uproar," said Gildersleeve. "The blue guys stormed the court and the fans went crazy. It was just that moment that I think a lot of us have been picturing for the last month."
Gildersleeve was named player of the match and tournament MVP.
"I was pretty shocked that I got it," she said. "Playing those games, our whole team was playing very well that whole tournament. It was a huge honour to get that. Especially coming from two years off. I didn't really expect anything really. It was a very nice thing to receive and having my mom and dad there was great."
Looking at the stats, Gildersleeve certainly earned her prize. She was second on the team in digs with 13 and her 23 kills were more than twice as many as her next highest teammate -the rest of the Mariners combined had 28 kills.
"She definitely rose to the challenge," coach Hyde told the Nanaimo Daily News. "She's a hard working athlete who's not afraid of anything."
Gildersleeve wasn't the only North Shore player to star for the Mariners. Handsworth grad Shenise Power, a right side hitter, was beside Gildersleeve all tournament. The two former club teammates with BCO even developed their own friendly rivalry during the tournament.
"Shenise had an unreal tournament - she had a lot of kills in the semifinal and we were joking around with each other, seeing who could get more aces," said Gildersleeve. "I serve after her so she would get a couple of aces and she'd go, 'Now it's your turn.'"
Power won the ace battle, racking up seven in the final, and was named to the tournament's first all-star team.
"It was great to have another BCO alum on the team," said Gildersleeve.
