On My U16 Volleyball Provincial Competition, Toronto, ON - April 22-25, 2026

On U16 Volleyball Provincials — Toronto, April 2026

The first two days were brutal in a specific way. We weren't being blown out — we were losing by one point. By two. Game after game, set after set, ending in margins so close they almost didn't feel like losses, except that they were. It's a particular kind of pain to play well enough to almost win and still walk off the court having lost. By the time I got to the car after day one, I sat in the passenger seat with my forehead against the cold window, not trusting myself to speak. My mom kept reaching for the right thing to say — you played great, it's a team game, no one person's fault — and all of it bounced off me. I didn't want philosophy. I didn't want consolation. I wasn't ready to be talked out of the feeling yet. I've been competing since I was twelve, and I still haven't figured out how to lose like an adult. Day two was the same — more one-point losses, more silent car rides, more trying to answer a question I couldn't put down: why do we keep losing the games we should be winning? I don't think it was talent. I think it was something quieter. A team can have all the skill in the world and still lose tight games if, in the moments that matter, no one is sure they deserve to win. That was us. We were good enough. We just didn't believe we were good enough at the right time.

The night before the playoffs, we found out in the car who we'd be playing first. The team we were matched against was one of the strongest in the bracket — a club team that, on paper, we had no business beating. My mom went quiet. She'd been encouraging me all this time, finding things to praise even when I couldn't take them in, and now she stopped talking. I knew why. She'd seen the matchup and done the math, and the math wasn't in our favour. And something about watching her — the person who'd been trying hardest to keep me hopeful — quietly give up on the game before it started shifted something in me. I wasn't ready to lose this one before we played it. I didn't know how we'd win. I just knew I wasn't going to spend another car ride home circling the same question. By the time we pulled into the driveway, something in me had settled. I'd made up my mind that we were going to win the next day, and I held onto that as if deciding it firmly enough could make it true.

We won. Not by one point — by a healthy margin. I can't fully describe what winning felt like, except to say that I've been chasing variations of that feeling since I was twelve and nothing else has come close.

What scares me a little is that I won't play volleyball forever, and at some point I'll have to figure out how to find that feeling somewhere else — in a project I built, a difficult exam I passed, a problem I solved that other people said I couldn't,  or in the harder, quieter version of winning that comes from helping someone who needed it more than I did. I'm trying to learn how to reproduce, in other parts of my life, the version of myself that decided in a car on a Friday night that we were going to win.