Anyone who’s been around Manitoba’s women’s volleyball program recently understands the talent in the room.
The No. 8 nationally ranked Bisons enter the winter break winners of their last eight games in a row, sitting at 10-2 in the conference standings. They’ve only surrendered ten sets all year, and on top of that, they’ve given up 15 points or less in 12 different sets.
It’s a special group of athletes who grew up playing Junior Bisons together. They’ve won at all levels and their trust with each other, along with legendary head coach Ken Bentley, former national champ Michelle Sawatzky-Koop and the rest of the staff is immense.
The team has all the pieces to win a national championship. They have the cerebral setter (Katreena Bentley), the consistent libero (Julia Arnold), two recent Team Canada selections (Raya Surinx, Ella Gray), a steady and intelligent right side (Andi Almonte) and two of the most efficient and versatile middles in the country (Brenna Bedosky, Eve Catojo).
As of this writing, Bentley leads the nation in assists per set, while Surinx has over 30 kills more than anyone else in Canada (196).
That’s not to mention the rest of the roster, who bring up the level of play during practice. There’s no drops in performance, anywhere. This team is good all across the board and as head coach Ken has mentioned, they’re going to need their whole team when the playoff push begins.
This group showed last season that they’re a force to be reckoned with, making a thrilling run to the final four at nationals. They didn’t graduate a single member of their roster, and so heading into 2023-24, it was clear what the ultimate goal was: bring home a national title.
In order to do that, the group knew they needed to do more.
“We made a point to be in the gym in the offseason, because we knew that to get from fourth place last year to first place this year, it was going to take extra. It was going to take more work than we did last year,” said Katreena.
“That was the only way we were going to accomplish that goal. We were in the gym all summer, the offseason was really where we put in the most work in the weight room. I think it’s really paying off now.”
But it wasn’t just the weight room where the squad put in work.
In order to climb the mountain and get to the pinnacle, Ken, along with lead strength and conditioning coach Cole Scheller put a focus on aerobic fitness.
“Fitness is a lot harder than strength,” admitted the head coach. “It’s harder to get it, it’s harder to keep it.”
“Fitness is a broad term. To me, and to [Ken], when we talk about fitness when it comes to volleyball, what we’re talking about is how prepared are you, to go in and do those things every day at a high level,” added Scheller.
“The thing about volleyball, what you have to do is jump really high, and swing your hand really hard to hit the ball. When you jump from really high you also land from really high. You have to deal with a whole bunch of impacts and collisions with the ground, and you have to be really confident that your shoulders, arms and elbows can tolerate enough stress to be able to practice those things at a high level.”
Breaking out of ‘fitness purgatory’
Through no fault of their own, it was harder for not only Manitoba, but every team in the country to keep their fitness up last year, especially during a three-day grind at nationals.
By that time, the program had been in regular season and playoff competition for over five months. It took its toll.
“Last year’s season, we were coming off of COVID things. Part about training and fitness is that it takes a long time, and you have to be consistent for a long time. When you’re talking about the changes you need physically to tolerate jumping and swinging, you’re talking about things that take a half a year or more of consistent effort, before you start to start to see the benefit from that,” said Scheller.
“Because of the way the training schedule worked coming into last year, the group kind of came in, and the volume of what needed to happen was so high compared to what they’d been doing for the last couple of years because of COVID lockdowns and shortened seasons. By the time they got into their season, we had identified that these girls were kind of just hanging on a bit. Sore knees, sore backs, sore shoulders.”
The wear and tear of the season in 2022-23 “meant that it was tough to actually be prepared to do things at the level they wanted to,” added Scheller.
This, to summarize, was what Ken described as being “in fitness purgatory.”
Therefore, Scheller added key conditioning components to the team’s base of training that “was already solid.”
“This team that Ken’s got, they all did Junior Bisons together. My first-ever paid job at the U of M coaching strength and conditioning was coaching Julia Arnold and Katreena in the weight room. That was in 2016 with our Junior Bisons program. These girls have been playing volleyball for their whole lives together, all the time, and they’ve been training the whole time. What kind of stuff haven’t they done,” he said.
“One of the things they didn’t do was a whole bunch of aerobic training. It seems kind of counter-intuitive. It’s not really an aerobic sport. But if you’re looking at humans in general, it turns out that having a capacity for aerobic fitness is really beneficial as far as allowing you to train the kind of things that volleyball is regularly and recover from those things.”
Long story short, what having good aerobic fitness will do, is allow you to play volleyball really hard on one day, then recover from it and play again the next day.
“It allows you to recover from bouts of power activity a lot quicker than if you didn’t have that,” noted Scheller.
As a group that ” legitimately love training” and “get after it when they do stuff,” it wasn’t hard for Scheller to convince them of his approach, which included hill training all summer, even on long weekends.
“We used the term volumize. What we were trying to do was get them spending an hour running and jumping. What we did was we started the sessions off by doing things like consecutive jumping or short sprints or change in direction,” he said.
“When we talk about hill sprinting, one of the reasons I wanted to do it over the hill was because the hill forces you to slow down. I was trying to make it so these girls could train all the time but not really worry about achilles or hamstring problems.”
Every week, all summer, the group would do more than last time. They kept adding and building up.
“These girls were all there, they were all really consistent and they tried so hard the whole time,” said Scheller.
“That’s the thing about high intensity interval training, is you’re uncomfortable the whole time. They embraced that to the max. Those things are hard, but they bought in. When we got back in the fall time, these girls absolutely smashed it.”
‘They’ll break down before we do’
The team has seen their efforts pay off this season. A perfect example was their game at home on November 18 against Mount Royal, the second game in a back-to-back.
Down a set entering the fourth, and four points away from a loss, the Bisons kept battling. Their level of play didn’t falter as the match continued. They won the fourth 25-23, and didn’t trail in the fifth after going up 4-3.
“Doing the things that they did allowed them to fall back on that body of work when they’re in high pressure situations, and continue to perform and exert at the level they’re used to,” said Scheller.
“They’re not competing against the fatigue of five sets in the second day. It’s not a we’re too tired to play against these guys. We’re going to perform at a level they can’t keep up with and they’ll break down before we do.”
A Ken says, the team “put it in.”
“They did a great job. Now they get to reap the benefits. It’s super rewarding for you to know that no matter how long the match goes, you’re just not going to budge your level. It’s so empowering when you get to that point in your fitness.”
“It’s crazy. Even the stuff we’re doing in practice, we couldn’t have done it last year,” added middle Brenna Bedosky, who’s posting career highs in points per set (2.94) and attacking percentage (.451).
“You can’t build from nothing, you can’t start preparing the day before. It starts all the way back in the summer. All that preparation is leading up to what we’re doing right now. It’s going to help us when we face Trinity in the second term, or UBC in the second term or other high ranked teams. It obviously pays off.”