![]() ![]() “There was this one time we went to play in the hometown of the then Grand Dragon of the Klu Klux Klan,” he recalled. Though I could run fast and jump high, I had to learn how to manage the ball and fit into a team sport.”īeing among a handful of Blacks playing the sport in the 1970s in Kentucky presented awkward and interesting moments. “I realized it was competitive, challenging and technical. “That is when I fell in love with the sport,” said Anderson who also played basketball, football and baseball. His perception of the sport being only for girls changed when his cousins took him to Chickasaw Park in Kentucky’s west end and he was blown away seeing men rocketing spikes across the net. “We are looking forward to making Canada proud and contributing to the team’s podium success.”Īnderson has come a long way since being introduced to volleyball while growing up in Kentucky. ![]() “We are very excited to be taking four of the top beach athletes to the Gold Coast for the Games,” he said. With success came a four-year contract in 2017 for Anderson who is at the Commonwealth Games where the sport is making its debut. The following year, the pair secured a bronze medal at the Parana Open tournament in Argentina. It was Canada’s best men’s result at the global event. In 2013, there were four teams with more than three Federation Internationale de Volleyball top 17th place finishes and Ben Saxton and Chaim Schalk placed fifth at the world championships in Poland. With the majority of the national teams struggling to make it out of qualifiers prior to Anderson’s arrival, light was emerging at the end of the tunnel. There were some nights when I slept at work because of bad weather conditions.” By the time I got back home at night, our son was sleeping. “The one-way ride lasted about 90 minutes and my wife and son were still asleep when I left for work most mornings. “I didn’t have a car for the first year, so I had to take public transit from our home in the Beaches to Volleyball Canada’s Beach High Performance Centre at Downsview Park,” Anderson said. Moving to a new country has its challenges as he soon found out. “She was cool with the idea as she has some family members here.”Īnderson’s wife and son joined him a month after his arrival in January 2013. “I called my wife who was at work and asked what she thought about going to Toronto,” he noted. Just minutes after Anderson and his partner decided they should relocate to North America so that he could be closer to his ailing mother, he checked his emails and found the Volleyball Canada head coaching position advertisement.Ĭanadian Sarah Maxwell, who was a professional beach volleyball player for eight years, forwarded it to Anderson. Once that was accomplished, I knew things would work out well.” “I had a plan on how the Canadian program was going to be successful and my biggest hurdle was getting the stakeholders to buy into it. “I wasn’t coming halfway around the world not to do well,” he said. When Anderson made the decision to take up the Canadian assignment, failure wasn’t an option.Īfter 17 years living and working in Australia, he uprooted his New Zealand-born partner Alicia Malcolm-Anderson (they tied the nuptial knot in Toronto in 2014) and their young son to make a fresh start in a new country with a one-year contract. ![]() Sam Schachter and Sam Pedlow are the world’s 14th ranked men’s team.īoth teams are in Australia for the Commonwealth Games that started on April 4. The Canadian women’s team of Heather Bansley and Sarah Pavan finished fifth in the 2016 Rio Olympics and Pavan, now teamed up with Melissa Humana-Paredes, are the top-ranked team in the world. “I let them know that is the Canadian sporting spirit as far as I am concerned and we were going to put in the work and be prepared to win every competition we participated in. “There was silence and, from the corner of my eye, I saw an athlete smiling and nodding as if to say ‘you are right’,” he pointed out. “One guy had enough guts to stand up and suggest that what I was saying was a bit arrogant, they are Canadians and what I had said had an American tone.”Īware that hockey is this country’s national pastime, Anderson reminded the group that every Canadian hockey team expects to win every tournament they enter. “When was the last time you got off a plane and expected to win an international tournament?,” he asked. The first words out of Anderson’s mouth were a direct question to the athletes. The Canadians didn’t qualify for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Since John Child and Mark Heese won bronze medals at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Canada’s best finish was sixth at the 2000 Sydney Games. With the talent and facilities, he couldn’t fathom why the program wasn’t successful. At the first meeting with athletes, coaches and stakeholders after being hired five years ago to oversee Canada’s beach volleyball program, Steve Anderson threw out his prepared speech and spoke from the heart. ![]()
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