During these strange and unpredictable times the FVC board is doing it’s best to plan for the 2021 indoor season. Here are some rough guidelines we are working on:
- We are not at this time planning on joining the Volleyball Alberta competition structure as we would in a typical year. This decision was not taken lightly and the data collected from the poll we sent to parents of players on our 2020 teams was overwhelmingly in favour of NOT traveling to Alberta for competitions and contributed to this decision.
- We are working with other clubs/teams in the East Kootenay region to see if we can organize a more regional competition structure/league which would begin in January.
- We expect to still run ‘Tryouts’ as we do in most years (timing likely between Dec 14th – 23rd). A few possible changes for this season:
- Teams will include a maximum of 10 players to allow us to organize into play cohorts (under the guidelines of max 50 people in a venue). e.g. a competition session at a 2-court venue may include 4 teams of 10 + 1 coach each, 2 referees, 2 videographers, etc
- We may decide on a case-by-case basis with athletes to NOT follow Volleyball Canada age groupings quite as strictly to allow more players/teams.
- We will do our best to form teams as long as we have appropriate numbers of like skilled/aged interested players, available coaches and gym time enough to facilitate practices. As has been the case in other years, it is likely that we won’t be able to form teams at certain ages and/or genders.
- It’s likely that the ‘groupings’ of teams within the league will include multiple age groups (and possibly mixed gender) to allow enough teams in a grouping/division to offer variety in play. This may lead to some less balanced play in some league matchups. (Which is no different than many matchups in the school volleyball scene in the region)
- For FVC teams, we expect to run 2x per week practices (typically Sunday to Friday) and at this point we expect many Saturdays will be used for regional competition. The ‘season’ would be expected to run from January until late April or mid May.
- If the Covid landscape changes and there is an opportunity to return to Volleyball Alberta, Volleyball BC or Volleyball Canada (Nationals) competitions before the end of the season, we may need to modify teams to tightly adhere to age categories.
- We do not yet have expected participation costs for our competitive team programs (regional league program) but plan to finalize these before Tryouts. We do anticipate the costs to be lower than in previous seasons since we won’t be factoring Volleyball Alberta tournament fees, coaching expenses for travel to Calgary/Edmonton, etc. And of course without the need by individual families for travel to Alberta, hotels, gas/food, etc we expect the financial cost of participating this season will be even lower when compared to a typical year. For those not familiar with our historical fee structure, here is a link describing our fees last year: https://fernievolleyball.com/2020-competitive-player-fees/ (FEES FOR THIS SEASON ARE NOT YET ESTABLISHED)
- If your player is keen on our competitive teams program with mid December tryouts and you haven’t yet completed our Expression of Interest, please make sure you do so here: https://forms.gle/yNpXshaYibiq5Eep9
- If you have previously completed this form but your player is now not intending to participate, we’d also like to hear from you to remove your player from our lists. Please send a quick email to club@fernievolleyball.com
All of this is very fluid and subject to change. More details to come in the next couple of weeks.