BU YEAR-END REPORT: Fresh lineup took BU to final four

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This article was published 06/04/2022 (1436 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Regardless of how vastly the Brandon University Bobcats exceeded expectations, head coach Grant Wilson’s first thought is how the season finished.

The Bobcats dropped a straight-sets decision to the Calgary Dinos in the Canada West men’s volleyball bronze-medal match, coming up one win shy of a trip to nationals.

“The ending was pretty disappointing,” Wilson said of his take on the season. “You’re in a one-game playoff situation to get to the national championship and you’re playing somebody not named Alberta or Trinity Western, so you feel like you want to take advantage of that opportunity.

“Unfortunately, it didn’t go our way that day and that’s just the way it is but when you look back at the entire year, to see how far we’ve come and know we were going into the season with no returning starters from the last time we had a Canada West season, to get as far as we did and get to the final four was a tremendous accomplishment for our group.”

The Bobcats weren’t expected to reach the final four after losing all their starters from 2019-20. They were unknown and unphased, battling the East Division to a 9-9 record good for second place. They survived two playoff pools by finishing in the top two before falling to Trinity Western and Calgary to end their season.

We wrap up our BU year-end reports with a men’s volleyball team that overachieved in everyone’s minds but their own.

LINEUP TAKES SHAPE

Five starters came back from the 2019 Canada West champion Bobcats for the 2019-20 campaign, with Chayse Warkentin and Bryton Such filling in at middle blocker and libero by the end of the season.

Four of them left after losing to Trinity Western in the conference semifinals that year, then Elliott Viles, Warkentin and Such graduated and chose not to use their fifth years in 2021-22.

That left as unpredictable a training-camp competition as Wilson has seen in his 10 years at the helm.

He knew captain Jake Fleming would take the setter spot and it’s tough not to play your imports, so Joao Cunha and Philipp Lauter were likely locks. But every other job was up for grabs and no one held one the entire season.

The most fascinating battle was between Bryston Keck and Paycen Warkentin for the second middle spot. Keck is six-foot-eight, slower and steadier than the explosive six-foot-four Warkentin, who Wilson would turn to for an offensive spark. By the end of the year, they rotated like baseball pitchers with Keck getting the start and Warkentin closing.

“I thought it benefited our team a lot. We could provide different looks and we could take a look at a lot of different opportunities, matchups, what we wanted to focus on. Obviously, Philipp was a pretty dynamic piece of that puzzle,” Wilson said.

“Whether it was Bryston’s read blocking or Paycen’s offence, it gave us the ability to change things up and made it more difficult for teams to prepare to play against us.”

The outside hitting situation was fluid. Brandon had five attackers see significant time in the three spots and most played both positions at some point.

BU started with rookie Tom Friesen on right side with Cunha and co-captain Max Brook on the left. Watt started at libero and was second in Canada West in digs during the first semester. Friesen missed some time with an injury and Rylan Metcalf stepped in, then Cunha spent more than a month in the winter term as a libero with a right shoulder injury. Besides the six-foot-eight Brazilian, the outsides were significantly smaller than the trio of Viles, Robin Baghdady and Seth Friesen. They couldn’t rely on simply jumping higher and swinging harder than opponents could handle, so Fleming ratcheted up the speed of his sets.

By the playoffs, Wilson settled on Brook and Friesen on left side and Watt on the right with Liam Nohr and Cunha splitting libero reps. After Brandon beat Mount Royal and Thompson Rivers and took Trinity Western to five sets in the first round, it lost to Alberta to open the second. Wilson unleashed Cunha on the right side and shifted Watt back to the left.

“It was a different look,” Wilson said. “What we did with our offence in terms of running at a much higher speed and trying to be a little more dynamic that way worked very well for our group.

“It was making sure we were in system, which comes back to serve receive and that’s why the guys that ended up on the floor, for the most part, ended up on the floor because they kept us in a stable situation and those guys could score.”

BY THE NUMBERS

Lauter turned out one of the best rookie seasons in U Sports history. He was the only rookie to crack the Canada West first-team all-star squad since the league merged with the Great Plains Athletic Conference in 2001. The six-foot-seven German middle blocker racked up 209 kills, a nation-leading 39 aces and a .380 hitting percentage good for second in Canada West.

Naturally, he was named the U Sports rookie of the year.

Brook was 11th in Canada West hitting percentage at .285 while Friesen was 26th at .198.

As a team, BU was seventh with a .236 hitting percentage and eighth with 11.21 kills per set. Alberta and Trinity Western led offensively at .330 and .328, respectively.

On defence, BU was seventh with 8.49 digs per set and fifth at 2.10 blocks per set.

As one of the few setters to take the vast majority of reps, Fleming was second with 9.48 assists per set in his lone season as a starter. He’s moving on with one year left on the table.

“Couldn’t be … happier for how Jake took the reins, how he ran the offence and how he orchestrated our group. It was great to see. It was not a surprise to us,” Wilson said. “He’s been working hard and waiting for the opportunity. He was behind a good setter in Reece Dixon when he got here so he knew he had to play the waiting game, learned everything he could along the way, prepared himself physically and mentally and was more than ready to take over and he did a fantastic job.”

POST-SEASON PUSH

The Bobcats peaked at the right time, rattling off eight straight set wins in the first round of the modified playoffs. BU beat Mount Royal in four sets then swept Thompson Rivers and took the first two sets off Trinity Western before the Spartans roared back to win in five.

After failing to produce anything resembling a good first touch in a 3-0 loss to Alberta, Brandon bounced back with its best effort against Winnipeg all year to win in four sets and reach the final four.

TWU made quick work of BU on its unbeaten playoff run, putting the Bobcats in the third-place match with Canada West’s third and final nationals berth on the line.

Calgary came to play as first-team all-Canadian Hamish Hazelden dominated and all-rookie team German Louis Kunstmann and Lincoln Baines took over in the middle.

“I just don’t think we played our best game,” Wilson said. “We have some people we rely upon to get the job done, and we’ve said it before that we do it as a group and by committee but if you have certain things not go your way that day, certain guys don’t have their A-game, and we certainly didn’t catch some of the breaks of the volleyball gods, the other team can take advantage.

“The first set we were struggling to find ourselves and we paid the price on the scoreboard but after that, it was extended points, 30-28 in the second set and 25-23, we’re two plays away or two breaks from being up 2-1.

“… Come crunch time it quite often is one or two plays that can make the difference at the end. Unfortunately for us, we didn’t make those plays and they did and full credit to them.”

Alberta would go on to beat Trinity Western in the national championship game in Winnipeg on March 27. Calgary finished fourth after losing the bronze medal game to RSEQ champion Sherbrooke.

MOVING FORWARD

The Bobcats only lose Fleming and Nohr so far and have Dauphin product JJ Love primed to step in at setter.

Wilson said consistency in mental preparation is the biggest key for the group to develop.

“You can jump high and hit hard and do all the physical things but if you’re not mentally prepared for the physical grind of Canada West and what it takes to succeed, taking care of your body, it’s a challenge,” he said.

Wilson recruited Stonewall product, Liam Pauls, as the integral piece of his 2022 rookie class and doesn’t see any pressing needs. BU has Nigel Tolley and Evan Mah at setter with the aforementioned depth at every position, except maybe a true libero.

The team gets a year older while most lose vital pieces to graduation.

It’s a long way away but Brandon is three years out from hosting nationals. Being within a match of qualifying already bodes well.

“It should give us confidence,” Wilson said. “Certain teams are almost always expected to, whether it’s to make playoffs, get to the final four, make nationals, we feel like we’ve developed that type of culture in our group that it becomes an expectation of everybody.

“Once everybody sees what it takes to buy in, prepare physically and prepare mentally, it gives you more opportunities to succeed down the road.”

“People understand that the hard work they put in paid off but maybe we needed to put in a bit more work,” Wilson added. “We didn’t quite get to where we needed to go in the end and I always think that’s good for motivation and helps the group continue to strive to be better.”

» tfriesen@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @thomasmfriesen