Each year, the final buzzer blares and for one team it sounds like a death knoll.

With the end of a season, there is a crushing sense of finality. There is something terrible about closure, something horrific about the realization that occurs mere seconds after the final game of the year. Hope ceases to exist; the land of second chances dissipates, leaving in its wake a hollow chamber that echoes what could have been, a reality inexorably fixed within the minds of a team that failed to grasp it.

Yet every so often, there is a team that finds a way to cheat closure. Year after year they stare the finality of losing in the face and refuse to submit. They string together victories and the insatiable desire for victory perpetuates their unblemished record.

We call these teams dynasties.

Currently, the UBC women’s volleyball team is in the midst of a historic run—four consecutive national championship victories, and a realistic chance of capturing their fifth this year.

They entered the season with a No. 1 CIS ranking, a team loaded with talent, including last year’s CIS player of the year Shanice Marcelle, and after the first few weeks of the season they are the only team still undefeated in the Canada West (6-0).

Regardless if they emerge victorious this season, this team has proven itself to be a formidable dynasty in Canadian university volleyball, and accordingly, a certain question must be asked.

Is this the greatest dynasty in UBC history?

***

Since the CIS became a country-wide collegiate association in 1961, UBC has captured 80 national titles, the most of any school in Canada. In the last 40 years, there have only been 6 years when UBC did not win a national title.

According to UBC Athletics director Bob Philip, a dynasty doesn’t necessarily mean consecutively stringing national titles together, and sustained success warrants labelling a team a dynasty.

In this regard, teams such as women’s field hockey are worth considering. Since 1998, they’ve won eight CIS titles, though no more than two of them consecutively. The men’s basketball team is another honourable mention. Each year they are a contender at nationals, and routinely are one of the top teams in the Canada West, but they haven’t won CIS gold since 1978.

Yet, there are only three teams in UBC’s history that have been remarkably dominant for consecutive years. They are in a class of their own.

Other than the volleyball team, the other two teams with comparable pedigrees of success are men’s soccer (four straight CIS titles) and the men’s and women’s swim teams (ten straight titles).

Setting a precedent: men’s soccer

Simply put, UBC’s soccer team sets the gold standard for top-flight collegiate soccer in North America. The team’s success is unrivaled in both the CIS and the NCAA. Not only did they win four in a row from 1989-92, but in 1993 they barely lost the CIS final, falling to the University of Sherbrooke on penalty kicks.

“The year we lost to Sherbrooke we outplayed [them] pretty drastically and rolled a ball off the post in the last minute or two, and the game remained tied,” said Dick Mosher, the head coach in those years. “We got beat in penalty kicks, and if we would have won those, we would have won six in a row because the next year we beat Alberta 5-0 in the final.”

Greg Zorbas, the head coach of Laurentian University during that era, whose team lost 2-1 to the Thunderbirds in the 1990 national semifinal, perhaps best summarized UBC’s dominance.

“UBC is by far the best team in Canada, and the second best team is their junior varsity team and the third are the guys that tried out and got cut,” Zorbas said in Don Wells’ book on the history of UBC athletics, Flight of the Thunderbirds.

Not only did UBC win five titles in six years, but they also won three in a row from 1984-86. This is without precedent in Canada, as no other team in CIS history has ever won three in a row. Even in the NCAA, only one team has won three in a row: the University of Virginia, who won four consecutive titles from 1991-94.

A part of the team’s success can be attributed to a persistent will to win. During their four-peat, they went on a streak of 52 consecutive victories.

“Having a fair amount of success breeds a certain amount of confidence in the players and you get that idea that you won’t be beat and I think that attitude pervaded the team,” said Mosher.

That confidence was something Mosher pointed to when discussing how his players kept themselves at the top of their game even when they were pushed to the brink—on the precipice of closure.

“Confidence and knowing that if we played to the end the result was going to be positive, because a lot of those games in those finals were overtime games, games won on a penalty shot, games where we were tied but we had to win to advance to the final and we scored in the last three minutes.

“Things were certainly falling right but you get a combination of luck in there and you get an unwillingness to accept defeat. Teams took us a number of times to the last three or four minutes and we still survived.”

Mike Mosher, the current men’s soccer coach, Dick Mosher’s son and a player for UBC during the early 90s, recounted one of those nail-biting moments when UBC was on the cusp of their dynasty being jeopardized.

“In 1991, I remember it was the 89th minute against McGill and if we tied the game we were out, and in the 89th minute we scored and our centre back Gary Kern got the cross in,” said Mike Mosher. “I mean, how many times will a centre back do that? It was just desperate times; last minute of the game he gets the cross in right down on the other team’s goal line and that was the winning goal that put us into the final.”

Kings and Queens: men’s and women’s swimming

Despite the dominance of men’s soccer, the UBC swim team set a standard that may prove impossible for any team to replicate. For ten years straight, from 1998 to 2007, both the men’s and women’s teams won the national championship. The women would go on to win their 11th in 2008.

In the history of North American collegiate sports, only five other teams, in any sport, have won ten or more consecutive national championships. All of those schools were in the NCAA, and of those schools, only two were not NCAA Division III. Louisianan State University women’s outdoor track and field team won 11 straight titles from 1987 to 1997, and the University of Arkansas men’s indoor track and field team won 12 straight championships from 1984 to 1995.

But UBC’s swim team was unique because both the men and women won 10 in a row. The only time this has been done in North America was by the men’s and women’s swim teams of Kenyon College. The women won 17 straight from 1984 to 2000 and the men won an unbelievable 31 straight from 1980 to 2010.

Though it has outstanding achievements, Kenyon is a small liberal arts school in Ohio that competes in NCAA Div III. In their conference, the North Coast Athletic Conference, there is not a single school with more than 3000 students.

“I know how hard we worked to get that record,” said current UBC head swimming coach Steve Price, who helped coach the program during their dynasty years. “I can assure you, if you blink once you will lose that championship, and that is what happened in 2007-08. They didn’t lose it by much, but they have been second ever since.

“I think you realize it when you are on the other side of the line. When you are just below that line you see how hard it was to actually maintain that….Now that I am past it a bit and look back, I [have] to go, ‘Wow, that was pretty amazing.’”

While the swimming team had its share of close calls—there were a few championships eked out by a small margin of points—the program routinely steamrolled their competitors.

In a sport that is dependent on strong individual performances, UBC’s roster was loaded with world class talent. Brian Johns, who swam for the men’s team near the end of their run, captured a CIS record by winning 33 of 34 events. Kelly Stefanyshyn won a gold medal in the 100 metre backstroke at the Pan Am Games in 1999. Brent Hayden went on to win a gold medal at the 2007 world championships, the first Canadian to do so in 21 years.

Bob Philip recounts attending one CIS championship meet and discussing the chances of winning gold the next day with the team’s former coach, Tom Johnson.

“Johnson told me, ‘Bob, we can’t lose tomorrow even if we don’t show up. We have so many points; nobody could get enough points to beat us.’”

UBC’s new darling: women’s volleyball 

For the past four years UBC has won national championships in every way imaginable. In 2008, in the CIS final against Montréal, they pulled off a nail-biting comeback, overcoming a 2-1 deficit which included an extra point victory in the fourth set. In 2009, they overcame an average 7-5 start and a No. 5 seeding to take home the gold. Then in 2010, they had a perfect record going 25-0 en route to their third title.

Yet for all their success, are they comparable to the behemoths that came before them?

They have yet to establish an unprecedented streak like their counterparts. The University of Alberta won six straight women’s volleyball titles from 1995 to 2000. And while they have won as many consecutive titles as soccer, before winning in 2008 they were shut out from CIS gold for 20 years.

“We had a fair long run where we were the perennial bridesmaids,” said head coach Doug Reimer. “We were always a strong program but had a decade of narrow losses in the national championships.”

And while their streak is nowhere near the level of what swimming accomplished, this dynasty has a few things in their favour.

They play in a very competitive Canada West conference that has 11 teams.

“Even making the national championship is far from a given,” said Reimer. “All it takes is losing two matches in the Canada West final four, and there you are playing teams that are usually ranked no worse than sixth in the country.”

On most occasions the only competition in the Canada West for swimming was Calgary, who was also UBC’s arch-rival in the CIS championships. Price said that the swim teams would use the Canada West to vault their teams into the CIS final and wouldn’t attend it fully rested.

“We typically have our players qualified for the CIS championships by December,” he said. “So we used [the Canada West] for a different purpose.”

And while the Canada West was still competitive in men’s soccer in the early 90s, the level of parity wasn’t close to what it is now. Mike Mosher agreed that the overall skill set of players and teams has risen since then and that it would be very difficult to replicate the success of that dynasty today.

The final divide between volleyball and swimming is the primary difference between the two sports. Volleyball is a quintessential team sport, whereas swimming, for the most part, is a sport of individuals.

“[Swimming] is an accumulation of individual achievement as opposed to a team sport,” said Philip.

With the consistent turnover of athletes every year, the volleyball team must contend with not just new people, but players in completely new roles.

“By no means is [winning] a given because you are not dealing with the same players in the same role. It makes it challenging…because we need a lot of time to develop those players with those new roles,” said Reimer.

Yet Price contends that the team elements of swimming are vital to winning titles as the point spread at the CIS level is different from the international level. He said a win doesn’t create an exponential point disparity, so having depth on a team is integral.

“You can’t do it on the back of one or two. They can have some individual success but this is by far the most team oriented of any other level of our aquatic sport,” Price said. “[The players] all recognize when they come to the pool that they have to be there for each other and they don’t want to let each other down because they know how important that one extra performance can be for the championship.

“You can’t have anyone weak on your squad if you want to win that championship. They all have to contribute.”

***

Fred Hume, UBC’s athletics historian, was silent for exactly 20 seconds when asked which team he thought was the greatest dynasty in UBC history.

It seemed like he wouldn’t give a decisive answer; the merits of each team made it impossible to claim one as better than another.

Finally, the unprecedented success of the swim team forced his tongue into motion.

“I would probably put swimming at number one,” he said. “You just kind of look at it and say, ‘Gosh, that is truly amazing.’”

Yet, Hume’s indecision speaks volumes about how amazing the accomplishments of these three teams are. They all share commonalities: they rewrote record books, dominated their respective sports, and more importantly, forestalled the brutal sting of closure.

But in the discourse of UBC’s greatest dynasties, women’s volleyball still has an ace up their sleeve. They haven’t lost.

“The program is building and developing and strong,” said Rayel Quiring, a fifth-year on the team who has been part of every championship. “I think we are not satisfied with four…and I fully expect to be a part of a dynasty, whether or not it is the greatest of all time or not.

“I think history still has to be written.”

(+3 rating, 3 votes)

 Loading ...