Gabrielle Roy Les Roys are Provincial A/AA Junior Varsity boys volleyball champions for the second year in a row.

"The kids were really fired up," said Les Roys coach Daniel Lother. "We've had a pretty good year. We lost a couple of games in the round robin at the provincials and they faced a little bit of adversity there. They were able to push through and put together some pretty good matches in the playoffs. I was really happy for them."

The Zone 13 champions defeated the Rosenort Redhawks 25-16, 25-23 in the final Saturday at Hapnot Collegiate in Flin Flon and Lother says the key to their success in that match was serving.

"We knew they were a very strong attacking team so if we served easily and put them in easy situations, it was going to be really hard to defend their attack. We focused on serving aggressively and try to get them in a little bit of trouble on their attack. We went on a couple of pretty big serving runs from a couple of our better servers and that was the main difference in the game."

Les Roys beat St. Paul's of Elie 25-16, 25-17 in the quarterfinals and that set up a semifinal match against their Zone 13 rivals.

Gabrielle Roy bounced back from a round robin loss to Green Valley and downed the Pirates 25-18, 25-15.

"We hadn't lost to them all year and didn't put together a good match in the round robin," Lother said. "Leading up to the semifinal we were pretty confident because we had some success against them during the course of the year so we just concentrated on that instead of concentrating on how poorly we played the day before. The guys again put together a good game and came together as a group which was really fun to see."

Right-side hitter Nicoles Carter was named to the All-Star Team and Reece Clarke was chosen the provincials MVP.

"He's a pretty skilled player for his age," said Lother when asked about his setter/left-side hitter. "Reece is definitely one of the leaders and he plays pretty high level club volleyball so the game is little bit slower to him at this level so he's able to think the game pretty well. He definitely was one of the main reasons we won. He served really well in the final and we kind of relied on him for that. Really happy he was able to put together a couple of good matches for us at the end."

Noah Boschman and Will Driedger of Green Valley were also selected to the All-Star Team.

The Pirates defeated Goose Lake of Roblin 23-25, 25-22, 15-12 in the Third Place game.


photo courtesy Hapnot Collegiate