The SFU volleyball team is approaching the end of its season, which means that some players are facing the end of their time in the program. One such player is Helen Yan. When she first came on the team, it was going through a transitional phase, which meant there were not many wins to come by. But now she can reflect on her time at SFU as a whole, and how her collegiate career is coming to an end.
“I think it’s going to feel very surreal,” said Yan on approaching her last games with the Clan. “The time here has passed so fast, that it’s going to be weird that it will [eventually] be my last time walking on the court.”
Yan’s collegiate volleyball career almost never happened, as she was not actively recruited coming out of high school. “I was originally coming to come here [just for] school,” explained Yan. “I was actually torn between SFU and UBC for a bit. Then I contacted the coach [Lisa Sulatycki, previous volleyball coach], and the girls on the team seemed very nice. It was the better option, since it was closer to home. And they have a really good biology program here.”
“I think I would have gone [down] a total different path if I did go to UBC. I think I’d just focus on academics, but I’m a lot happier with my decision [to come] here.”
The early part of Yan’s career was in the program’s early years in the NCAA. In her first season with the team in 2012, they finished with a 1–17 record in GNAC play, and 4–22 overall. Two years later, the team finished with a 17–9 overall record, enough to place fifth in the GNAC. The team is currently on pace for the same finish this season.
Yan has been around for all the highs and lows, but struggles to describe the rise of the program.
“It’s feels unreal. It’s hard for me to find words to describe it. My first year was really depressing. It took a big emotional toll on me but I didn’t really know any better because I was a first-year. I wasn’t really sure what to expect. And after we got Gina [Schmidt, Head Coach], the tables have turned. I felt a lot closer to the game after that.
“In my first year I didn’t know if I was going to be able to lose for four years,” she continued. “I didn’t know if I could handle that emotionally. But ever since we’ve had Gina and the [new] girls coming, it’s been such a different environment. As bad as it is to say, in [my] first year, it almost felt useless to practice. Now there’s a purpose, and everyone has a common goal in mind.”
Yan went on to explain that when they were playing the top-ranked teams in her first year, “you knew we weren’t going to win.” That all changed when the team hired Schmidt as the new Head Coach.
“She looks at the sport so differently,” Yan noted. “She just knows so much about every position that I never even began to understand. She’s patient, she’s easy to talk to, and you can just tell everything she says makes sense. Whereas before, the coach [Sulatycki], she wasn’t that bad, but sometimes there wasn’t very much trust between the players and the coach, and now there’s so much trust. [Schmidt] could tell us to run outside in the freezing cold and we would do it, because we knew there [would be] a reason behind it.”
When asked about her favourite moment on the team, she pointed to a game that happened earlier this year. “One of our first home games of the season against Seattle Pacific, we were down [seven points] in the fifth set [. . .] and then Gina looks at me and says ‘You’re going to play back row for so and so,’ and I was freaking out. We came back to win, and it was unreal to be a part of that.”
So what does Yan think the team’s future will be like once she’s departed? “I think it’s just going to keep going uphill. [Schmidt’s] got great recruits coming in, she’s got a good base here, the girls obviously love her already. I think the program is going to be one of those nationally ranked teams pretty soon.I think it can be done within the next three to five years.”
Yan may be leaving the team, but she won’t be leaving SFU — she still has two years left of her degree in biology, and then she plans to pursue her masters in marine biology. And she’ll be making it to as many volleyball games as she can. “Now I can start making fun of the other team,” she laughed.
