The YT Elites 18u female volleyball team has spiked silver at the B.C. Provincials.

The provincials were held at the Richmond Olympic Oval April 15-17.

The Elites are based out of the YT Elites Volleyball Club in Whitehorse.

The 18u female team consisted of mostly 18-year-olds with a couple of 17-year-olds.

According to head coach Gary Seeley, the team came together out of tryouts in December.

“We’ve been practicing all year to go to B.C. Provincials and then on to nationals in Edmonton in May,” related Seeley.

The Elites had limited competition going into the provincials.

“That’s the tough part,” said Seeley.

“YT Elites does have another 17-18U team that we play against and then we play against some of the other club teams that are more U16 and U15, so younger than our age category.

“Not a lot of competition here. That’s why we go out.”

Seeley described how the weekend played out.

“First time being out in over two years. Last time we were out as a team was January 2020. We went down to an Alberta Premier, most of these kids, the nucleus of this team with just a couple changes. So this is our first time out and first time with real competition.

“So Day One we had won one match and lost two, placing us third in our pool – lost our first two, but won our third one, so as the day went on, without any real (prior) competition, we just got a little better each time we got on the court and got a chance to find our fire again that we hadn’t had in a long time.”

“Which led us into Day two,” recalled Seeley.

“We had to do a qualifier to get into quarter-finals and we won that one and then we won our quarter-final match and then we won our semi-final match and that of course took us to the gold medal, where we lost two straight.”

Despite not winning gold, the club attained its goals.

“We had goals going down, little goals that we had set for the weekend,” explained Seeley.

“First just to win a set and then to win a match, which we had taken care of on Saturday and then our third goal, our big goal, was to try to get into the medal game, not knowing what the competition was going to be like or what we were gonna face, so when we met that goal, and the athletes knew they were going to be in a medal game, that was a big success for us on its own. Sure, we would have liked to have won the gold but we reached all our goals for the weekend.

“I was talkin’ to a lot of the other coaches down there so considering that was only seven matches for our year except for a little bit of competition we’ve had up here – and the team we played in the gold medal (game), that was their 35th match of the year. So just without the competition, we were just finding our groove, where some of these people had already plateaued.”

The gold medal winning team was the Seaside Surf out of the South Surrey-White Rock area, a “very good team,” according to Seeley.

The girls ended up feeling pretty good about settling for silver.

“At first, they had gold in their mind,” said Seeley.

“You have a chance to win that – they’re competitive kids who would have liked to have that. But once they had a chance to reflect and look back at the weekend ... we went over our goals and how we met everything, and how pleased we were as a coaching staff with their performance, they were very excited to get up on the stage and get presented silver medals for Yukon.”

As for what’s next for the team, “we will, in May, head down to Edmonton, to the Nationals,” said Seeley.

“They run from May 21-24. It’s from ages 16-18 years old and it’s a big tournament and there will be possibly 600 teams there combined from different tiers to try to medal and all the teams from across the country will be there.”

The YT Elites will be playing in Tier 3 again.

Seeley added that he wanted “just to make sure how proud the coaching staff was of this group of athletes. You could see their skill – we were probably one of the smaller teams there. We don’t have a lot of height but ... we were one of the smaller statured teams there but with our skill that we’ve been working on over the last couple of years, as far as ball handling and passing and serving, that’s what prevailed us to be able to make it through some of those other teams.”