Heslinga repeats as player of the year

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This article was published 21/03/2025 (209 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The best player in U Sports got better last summer.

You’d think if anyone could get away with complacency, it’d be Isaac Heslinga. But last year’s U Sports men’s volleyball player of the year knew that wouldn’t be the case.

The Alberta Golden Bears star put together another astounding statistical season and received the award for a second straight year at the all-Canadian breakfast at Brandon’s Victoria Inn on Thursday.

“I said it last year but I looked through the list of people who have won it in the past and it’s pretty crazy to be amongst those names. Very honoured to see my name,” Heslinga said, adding his deep Alberta team pushed him hard.

“If you don’t show up to practice and expect to get by just going through the motions, you’ll get exploited for that. You won’t have a good practice. The guys on our team are too good.

“Our coaches will call you out on that too. We hold ourselves to a pretty high standard and there’s a lot of self-accountability, but there’s also a lot of holding each other accountable.”

Heslinga posted 373 kills in 2023-24, a 24-match regular season. He recorded 340 while playing 19 of 20 this year, good for a whopping 4.59 kills per set.

He led the nation in both categories and finished ninth with a .373 hitting percentage, especially impressive considering he took more than 700 attempts.

Heslinga feels his skills improved across the board going into his fourth U Sports season after a summer with Volleyball Canada’s NextGen team. They travelled to the Dominican Republic in July and hosted the NORCECA men’s Final 6 tournament in August in Gatineau, Que., finishing second to the United States.

That experience makes the toughest post-secondary conference in Canada feel a little more manageable.

“Guys are hitting harder, passing more accurately, getting digs on balls that you wouldn’t see as much in university,” Heslinga said.

“You can’t get by doing the same things you do in university. I’ve been learning that even just playing better teams. There’s defences that are going to pick up shots that will work against lower-end teams, just a big learning curve.”

The Golden Bears went 16-4 to finish second in Canada West. They beat the Calgary Dinos in the quarterfinals, then came back from down 2-1 to defeat the UBC Thunderbirds in five sets as Heslinga recorded a team-high 14 kills.

He only had five kills and three errors in the final before taking a seat during a 3-0 loss to the Winnipeg Wesmen, who hold the No. 1 seed and face the host Brandon University Bobcats today at 6 p.m.

But Alberta extended its streak to 24 straight national berths while Heslinga made it 26 consecutive Canada West men’s volleyballers winning player of the year.

The No. 3-seed Bears face the Ontario University Athletics runner-up Windsor Lancers today at 2 p.m. They follow the team they beat in last year’s national final, the No. 2 Sherbrooke Vert et Or and the Western Mustangs, who kick off the tournament at noon.

With Saskatchewan facing Queen’s on Brandon and Winnipeg’s side of the draw, Alberta gets a full slate of teams it hasn’t seen this year.

“It’s a pretty standard nationals experience for us,” said Heslinga, one of few players who can utter such a sentence.

“There’s a lot of teams we don’t get to see, that’s part of the fun though, the teams you haven’t played before and learning their tendencies.

“It’s always fun to play teams with guys you haven’t played against before.”

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