Bump, set, spike: Dinos teach students of all skill levels volleyball during unique one day camp

For the average junior high student, volleyball can be a counterintuitive and hard-to-learn sport. By partnering with the Calgary Dinos Men’s Volleyball team, Andy Brar, a Teacher at Dr. Gordon Higgins School, hopes to break as many of those barriers as he can.

For a one day camp, players and coaches from the Calgary Dinos Men’s volleyball team visited the Dr. Gordon Higgins junior high school for a three-hour, two section volleyball camp, at no cost to the school or the students.

“It’s the culmination of two individuals coming together and really highlighting the beauty of their two institutions, for example, the University of Calgary and their esteemed athletic program and the beautiful diversity that exists in a northeast school like this,” Brar told LWC.

With attendance set through an open sign up, Brar said he encouraged students who are unfamiliar with volleyball to attend, as volleyball, though the root of the event, was only a piece of the camp.

“The hope for this camp would be to take these skills and apply them to their everyday life, but also to understand the next time I’m faced with the challenge or I haven’t done something before to step up and jump on opportunities,” he said.

Life skills aside, Brar valued a camp of this caliber, having university level athletes and a former Olympian as instructors at over $20,000 per student. The camp offered a unique opportunity to learn from the best, especially for the students who may have less experience with the sport.

“If you give students confidence months in advance of tryouts, you’re exposing them to a new sport. When that individual who’s giving the instruction is a two-time Olympian, it really highlights the importance of the sport and the underlying commitments of teamwork, communication and building togetherness,” Brar said.

The Olympian in question, second-year Dinos’ head coach Graham Vigrass, said the opportunity was equally valuable for the Dinos team, especially at this point in the season.

“I was excited to see how much fun our guys are having. It’s a time of the year that they’re a bit burnt out from all the practices and matches that we have and this is a bit of a refresh and gets back to their love of the game,” said Vigrass, who represented Canada at the Olympics in 2016 and 2020.

“They see kids that are pumped and excited to see them and get their autographs, I hope that it makes them understand why they fell in love with the game when they were this age, because it’s kind of easy to forget it.”

Brar, who recently was honoured with the 2025 Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence, hopes the camps can become a somewhat regular thing for his students, a feeling reciprocated by Vigrass.

“This is the first time we’ve done (a camp like this). I’m a newer coach at U of C, but this is a huge priority of mine, is to get out to community and ideally, to communities like this that don’t necessarily have that same opportunity as some others in Calgary,” he said.