World Champion and Canadian Olympian Sarah Pavan joins the show!! Sarah and partner Melissa Humana-Paredes won the 2019 World Championships. Also on the beach Sarah has earned a 5th at the 2016 Olympic Games, 3x FIVB World Tour Best Blocker, Commonwealth Games Champion, and 17-time World Tour medals

Sarah Pavan attended the University of Nebraska where she was named a 4-time First-Team All-American, National Player of the Year and Honda Broderick Cup as the top female student-athlete in the country in 2007.  Sarah and the Cornhuskers won the 2006 NCAA National Championship. 

Pavan played professionally in Italy, Brazil, China, and South Korea. During her indoor career she won 2 Brazilian Superliga Championships and the European Volleyball League’s top attacker.

To work with Sarah or learn more about Next Lvl Consulting please use this link: https://www.nextlvlconsulting.com/

We hope you enjoyed this episode! Please leave a 5star review and tell your friends! Stay Excellent! 

This week’s guest is one of few people who has played both indoor and beach volleyball internationally. This Canadian Olympian came to the US to play NCAA Volleyball at the University of Nebraska where she won a national championship. Sarah went on to play internationally in Korea, Italy, Brazil, and China. Sarah then made the switch from indoor to beach after realizing she would not be able to represent Canada due to the nation's ability to get to the Olympics. After finally solidifying her position in beach, find out how Sarah worked at transitioning from indoor to beach, her experiences playing in multiple countries, and how the postponement of the 2021 Olympics has affected her. 

Have you ever tried running on the beach? Let alone jumping in the sand? This week’s guest is Sarah Pavan, a pro beach volleyballer who has represented Canada in the Olympics. Her road to pro-sand volleyball is a unique one, getting her start at indoor, playing for the University of Nebraska and winning a national championship. She is one of the few people who has played internationally for BOTH indoor and beach volleyball. Enjoy her story about the transition from indoor to outdoor, her road to 2021 Olympics, and more.  

Be prepared to learn about:

• The key to finding the right volleyball partner
• How the Brazil Olympics felt like home
• High pressure games and how they differ from indoor to outdoor
• Playing her sport in Asia vs. Europe

We hope you enjoy this week’s episode of, The Global Game, brought to you by Uru Sports.

And if you're looking to learn more about playing around the world be sure to join our global sports community full of information, opportunities and amazing connections at urusports.com!

On this week’s episode, beach volleyball players Sarah Pavan and Melissa Humana-Paredes join the podcast to chat equal rights, being Canada’s first ever beach volleyball team to win a World Championship, and why becoming a lululemon Elite Ambassador was the right move for them.

Sarah and Melissa both have a deep history with volleyball; Sarah spent years playing indoor before switching over, while Melissa’s dad was a coach in the sport. After having lucrative success with other partners, Sarah and Melissa joined forces in 2017 and have been unstoppable since. On this week’s episode, they share what it’s like to join a new team, and why they work so well together.

The duo is the reigning World Champions, and tell Christina what winning that title meant to them and how it’s brought more attention to the sport. They’ve become bigger role models and are now Elite Ambassadors with lululemon. They say their success has opened people’s eyes as to what the sport is all about, as there are a lot of misconceptions out there. They are now hoping to continue that magic at the Tokyo Olympics.

Sarah & Melissa are also vocal about equal rights and what they’d like to see changed for women in sport.

We also talk about:

• Women’s rights
• Being Canada’s first World Championship team
• Tokyo Olympics
• Becoming lululemon Elite Ambassadors
• Why they pull their pants down in front of each other before each match

Quote:  

“We’re never really celebrated for our athleticism and what we do, it’s always something more. Our bodies, what we’re wearing, our hair, how we talk, what our boyfriend looks like, and it’s just absurd, quite frankly, because never in a man’s sport will those things ever be discussed.”

-Sarah Pavan, Team Canada Beach Volleyball Player

Resources:

Guest Info

Sarah Pavan

Instagram: @sarah_pavan

YouTube: Sarah Pavan Volleyball

Twitter: @sarahpavan

Facebook: Sarah Pavan

Melissa Humana-Parades

Instagram: @melissahumanaparedes

Twitter: @melissahumanaparedez

YouTube: Melissa Humana-Paredes

Host Info – Christina Heydanus

Instagram: @tinaheydanus

Twitter: @tinaheydanus

Show Info – Opening the Playbook

Website: openingtheplaybook.com

Instagram: @openingtheplaybook

Facebook: Opening the Playbook

Promotional Content:

If you're enjoying this podcast, be sure to check out two others. For more sports, tune into The Voice & The Coach, hosted by Vancouver Giant Play-by-Play announcer Dan O'Connor and WHL Coach of the Year Mark Holick. For conversation, check out Their Life Story, hosted by Robin Lavigne.

It wasn’t exactly an audacious start, was it? September 12, 2016. The first match of Melissa Humana-Paredes’ and Sarah Pavan’s partnership: A country quota against Brandie Wilkerson and – who else? – Pavan’s former partner, Heather Bansley, in Toronto, no less, the training center for the Canadian national team, where Pavan has played something of a revolutionary role.

She did not, however, play that role on September 12 of 2016. On that day, her and Humana-Paredes, an affable young defender of 23 years at the time, lost, 21-23, 13-21.

They wondered, almost incredulously, if they could feel such an emotion at the time, why a reporter had reminded them of that loss. He had reminded them in the moments after they had won the World Championship. It was Canada’s first. A momentous achievement not just for two individuals carving out history in a sport rich in it, but for a nation that is rapidly creating a foothold in a space traditionally dominated by countries south of the Canadian border.  

“Why would you remind us of that?” they wondered, simultaneously.

Because it makes the narrative that much sweeter, the process that much more real. There is no relating to a story with a smooth beginning, steep curve in the middle and a World Championship at the end. They know it, too, even if they didn’t want to relive that country quota loss quite so soon after reaching a new pinnacle for Canadian beach volleyball.

“Every failure,” Pavan said, “has led to this moment. Nobody sees the tough moments.”

What most see is that Humana-Paredes and Pavan are currently doing for Canada, on their on relative scale, what Kerri Walsh Jennings and Misty May Treanor once did for the United States: They’re writing their own country’s history.  

It was at Gstaad, where the best players in the world are currently competing, a year ago where Pavan and Humana-Paredes claimed Canada’s first major title. Didn’t even lose a match, those Canadians, dethroning the countries that laid the foundation of beach volleyball’s traditional powers that be: 21-15, 21-15 over the United States, 14-21, 21-12, 15-13 over Brazil, 21-17, 12-21, 17-15 over Germany. Only months before that, they had become the first Canadian team to win a Commonwealth Games.

It was last June when Humana-Paredes said, on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter, that “we have so much more that we need to improve on and that we can improve on and I think our potential – it seems limitless right now." 

Prophetic words. It hasn’t all been pretty, and they knew it wouldn’t. Pavan knew she was taking a chance on Humana-Paredes then, who had been relatively unproven at the time. She knew the potential upside, an upside that is now paying dividends in the form of history, of major titles, of World Championships.

“It happened much quicker than either of us expected,” Pavan said on that episode a year ago, and those same words ring true a year later. “It’s nice to see the grit and the fire of not being satisfied with making one semifinal or one podium or whatever.”

And so they’ll continue to remain unsatisfied. So long as reporters continue to remind them of their humble beginnings, if not only to show them just how far they’ve come.

“The things we have overcome this week, last week, this year, in the last two years, three years and now we’re world champions,” Humana-Paredes said. “I have no words.”

No need for words when you have history.