Flying French Fries win annual Big Thaw Coed Volleyball Tournament

Volleyball players competed for a good cause at the fourth annual Big Thaw Coed Volleyball Tournament, held at Vanier Secondary School on Saturday.

Volleyball players competed for a good cause at the fourth annual Big Thaw Coed Volleyball Tournament, held at Vanier Secondary School on Saturday.

The tournament was a fundraiser for Volleyball Yukon to send a group of kids to club nationals, which take place in various locations this year in B.C. and Calgary.

Four girls’ teams and two boys’ squads from the Yukon will go in total.

All of the tournament’s entry fees were donated towards sending the kids to club nationals. The price of each team to participate was $120, which raised just over $1,300.

“It is a good little fundraiser for Volleyball Yukon,” said tournament organizer Al Foster.

“It’s a chance to raise money and have some fun at the same time.”

This year 11 teams participated in the tournament, which was up from 10 the previous year.

Among the teams included squads from Juneau and Haines, while the rest were from Whitehorse.

Teams were divided into two pools and played a total of eight round robin games.

The top two teams in each pool qualified for the semi-finals. Each team had to have at least two of each gender.

Matches were decided in a best of three format up to 25 points, with the exception of the third set, if it was necessary. The third set went up to 15 points.

Teams were competing for a trophy and bragging rights.

This year’s winner was Whitehorse team the Flying French Fries, who defeated Team Juneau in the final in a thrilling three-set match.

In the final match of the tournament, Team Juneau got off to a great start and didn’t relinquish the lead after scoring two quick points to make the score 8-6. Juneau went on to claim the opening set by the close score of 25-23.

The French Fries didn’t let facing elimination faze them a bit and rebounded in the second set to get the 25-21 victory.

With the pressure on both teams heading into the deciding set, the French Fries pulled out an impressive 15-12 victory to take the cup for the first tim in their four year history at the event.

“It feels good,” said French Fries captain Alain Desrochers. “I never thought we could win this at the beginning, but we got through and I’m pretty happy.”

Desrochers, who joked about the team planning to train for the Beijing Olympics, said the difference was crowd support the team had the whole tournament.

“It was pretty intense and the teams were pretty equal, but we won because we had cheerleaders,” he said.

“Nobody had cheerleaders except for us, so that made a huge impact.”