Switching to Silence

From an early age, we’re taught to base our biggest decisions on predicted — ideally positive — outcomes. Find what you’re good at, and pursue that path. It’s what parents and teachers have always taught us, and that to which we’ve always listened.

Jeremy Finn knew what he was good at. Everybody did. But he jumped in a different direction.

Not everybody does.

Comfort in self often comes coupled with a sense of peer identity: knowing our place, our role. That feeling is only amplified in team sports. You’re a starter; a point guard; a basketball player; a hard worker. Sticking to the positive stereotypes associated with you, honing them as much as you can — it’s not only supposed to put you on the path to success, but keep you safe. Few are brave enough to shed the safety net. Even fewer dare to walk the high wire anyway.

Choices often take time to yield results, even longer to manifest meaning. In Finn’s case, it took five years of questioning one big decision, until he finally found himself at peace — seated as much with teammates as his own zig-zagged destiny — after the final set.

When he was in high school, Finn told his mom that the best thing about volleyball was that it taught him to jump higher for basketball. After all, he’d only picked up the former because his ninth-grade girlfriend had. Like most 15-year-old boys, he was eager to impress the girls any way he could.

“I was always the basketball dude,” Finn says, lazed-back on a basement suite couch in Victoria, Canada, flipping a volleyball between his fingers. He laughs, no doubt remembering blitzing up and down the hardwood for layups (and the occasional dunk).

In 2010, Finn led Mount Boucherie Senior Secondary’s basketball team in scoring, receiving Honourable Mention All-Star at the AAA Okanagan Zone Tournament. Six-foot-two, athletic, and unafraid of contact, he had the body and attitude to transition seamlessly to the next level.

Finn was offered spots on teams throughout the Canadian Interuniversity Sport— Canada’s top post-secondary athletics league — but decided to introduce himself to volleyball coaches at the lower college division (by email, no less). Basketball games, Finn felt, often involved taking on squads with solo displays of athleticism. Volleyball, meanwhile, seemed to define what it meant to play in a team.

“Volleyball is the ultimate team sport,” says Finn. “Every touch of the ball counts.”

Camosun College’s coach, Charles Parkinson, was on hand to watch what Finn still describes as his best ever high school performance, and recruited the outside hitter out west to Vancouver Island.

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As a child, Finn was into anything that involved movement. He started skiing at two years old. At five, he was playing soccer. He waterskied, wakeboarded, mountain biked, and ran laps around the table at dinnertime.

In spring, the family would drive home from skiing all day at Big White Mountain, passing people golfing as they approached town.

“Oh my god, I want to go golfing,” his mom, Vickie, remembers him screaming. As the car crossed the Okanagan Lake Floating Bridge, it became, “Oh my god, it’s calm, we should go wake boarding.” Upon arriving at the house, a friend of Finn’s would invariably call, and out Finn would go to bike.

He’d always wanted to be part of everything that was going on around him, rather than forced to focus on a single game or task. Having other sports readily available at Camosun would’ve been hard anyway, but basketball was different: It was the one game that had started as therapy.

On an August afternoon, seven-year-old Finn, his nine-year-old sister, and her friend filled the backseat of the family Isuzu Trooper. Owing to the oppressive heat, Vickie decided to drive the kids to the beach. Along the way, summer chatter filled another clear Kelowna day, until it was all silenced by a deafening smash.

Another woman’s car rumbled through a red light and plowed into the driver side door, flinging the passenger side into two parked cars. Finn doesn’t remember much about the impact, or even getting out of the car. Only sitting on a hill with his sister and her friend, looking down at the wreckage with an orange juice. An adult told them it was going to be alright.

Vickie soon underwent neck surgery to remove discs that had become pressed against her spinal cord. She lost use of her right arm, and — in a wholly unexpected complication — suffered detached vocal cords. Jeremy only remembers his mom leaving her voice in a hospital bed.

Another surgery would repair the damage, but even that couldn’t prevent a decade-long impact on family life. For years, Vickie couldn’t so much as ski, and to this day has yet to get up on water skis. She couldn’t operate the heavy machinery frequently required in her position as an x-ray technician, and was forced to switch into the cardiology department. All the while, Finn refused to sleep over at friends’ houses. He wouldn’t get in other people’s cars. He began acting out at school.

Then, one of Finn’s grade-five teachers, Gerry Kroeker, introduced his struggling student to basketball. The repetition of dribbling and shooting was, unlike so much that had befallen him, comfortingly predictable. The rhythm was calming.

Already equipped with size and speed, Finn improved his skills rapidly as a high-octane point guard, routinely streaking down the lane and past helpless defenders. Soon, the kid who always wanted to play everything gave up soccer. Skiing went next. Pics from SLAM and Hoop plastered his room. He worshipped Jamario Moon, following the Toronto Raptors and Cleveland Cavs when his favorite player switched squads. For years, his school attire rotated between pairs of baggy, black basketball shorts, adding a down jacket only when it snowed.

As Finn winnowed down his focus ever further, other sports became mere means to basketball’s end. As a high school senior, he was named a top-25 player in British Columbia by The Province. Everything, it seemed, was set in stone — his love of the game was destined to bloom forever.

So when Finn suddenly decided to attend Camosun for volleyball, he wasn’t merely switching sports; he was altering his very sense of self. It’s a decision he thinks about often.

“It was like going from one gang to another,” Finn says. “The lingo is different, the clothes, the relationships. Sports are sports, but they all have a culture unique to themselves.”

Kevin Light Photography

Finn’s first two years at Camosun were, by and large, a disappointment. He had always been a natural athlete — someone who could pick up a sport and excel almost immediately. Now, he was relegated to watching from the bench. Making matters worse, the volleyball team routinely practiced before or after Camosun’s basketball squad. Sitting courtside, Finn would watch as the cagers raced up and down the hardwood, knowing he might’ve been one of them, had he only stopped to think it through.

By the end of his second season, Finn had taken to re-weighing his options, trying out for the school’s basketball team, and drafting an introductory email to the head coach at Langara College in Vancouver, a mere two-hour ferry ride away. However, Langara informed Finn he would likely lose credits if he transferred. So, he stuck it out; by his third year, Finn was quickly gaining more playing time.

By his fourth, he was named team captain.

While playing time and leadership responsibilities may have changed, certain things held constant. Finn had always been an emotional competitor, someone who thrived on spiking kills and blocking opponents’ bombs. He was the first to celebrate a point with a pair of clenched fists, his teammates rising to rancor along with them.

He was also the first to hang his head after a mistake, and became known for quaking under pressure. It wasn’t the opponent that was the problem; Finn would compete against anyone, and do it with uncommon aplomb. Rather, it was the voice in his head — the one telling him he needed to be better; that being good wasn’t good enough — that couldn’t be defeated. Finn’s self-depricating ways became so well known, that opposing teams took to scribbling snipes on their locker-room whiteboards:

“BREAK JEREMY FINN,” read one. “The team goes up or down with him.”

Kevin Light Photography

“Jeremy was sort of an all-or-nothing type player,” recalls Camosun head coach, Charles Parkinson. “He would have three shots: hard, harder, and hardest. Everything was max velocity.”

Despite Finn’s relative inexperience, Parkinson saw flashes of brilliance in the young player. When he was in control (heavy, heavy emphasis on when), he could navigate sets with a rare combination of grace and power. Whenever Finn stepped up to serve, he’d hear his mother, Vickie, imploring from the crowd.

“Breathe,” she would yell — a friendly reminder to her perpetual-motion machine to slow down, for goodness sake. Parkinson tried to teach his fiery leftside that hitting a ball softly over the net may sometimes lose the point, but it also might salvage one. A ball powered out of bounds, meanwhile, is a guaranteed notch for the other side.

For his first four and a half years, Finn would cup headphones to his ears during pregame warmups, pumping anything with bass and a hyped-up tempo. He caged himself up, channeling his frustrations into emotional rapids that risked cracking the dam’s walls.

No unforced errors. Show them you’ve improved. I should’ve chosen basketball.

When the headphones became unplugged, Finn slingshotted towards his opponents — full abandon, but little in the way of measure.

Finally, during the last semester of Finn’s fifth year, the headphones stayed at home. Instead, he chatted with teammates. He smiled. He took in his surroundings. More importantly, he heeded a previous captain’s sage advice:

“The best volleyball I ever played was at the end of my career because I finally realized I don’t have to worry about getting better anymore,” he recalls. “This is it.”

He began easing into sets, letting the spikes and serves come to him. When he made a mistake, he’d quickly huddle his teammates together, encouraging them to lift up as one — as a unit, as a team.

“I’ve always been my worst critic,” Finn says. “The biggest change I had to make was learning how to make mistakes and not let them bring me down. I think this year I finally figured out how to do that and it changed my game completely.”

For four years, Finn had lived for big points and striking plays. They were, in short, his way of justifying why he was a volleyball player, and not a basketball star. At the time, he’d often take to hoisting shots with the cagers on off-days, or watch portions of their practices, wondering. Perhaps he still felt he owed something to the game that had kept him going through his toughest time. He wanted to hang onto that safety net; that rhythm he could count on.

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At the start of his final season, Finn embraced a far less glorious role. He wouldn’t become the big-time point scorer he’d pictured, as he watched on from the bench those first few years. He did his best to forget his own numbers, to shift his emotional manna to his teammates; being the quintessential “glue guy” for a Chargers team fast racking up wins.

“He’s one of everyone’s biggest role models,” says Camosun setter Vitor Macedo. “The guy works out every single day, he’s never tired. He was always willing to do everything he could to help out the team… Things that we all know we should do, but we don’t really do. He cares about his teammates. And not only one or two, or the starters. Everyone.”

During Finn’s final year, the small West Coast college was awarded host honors for the Provincial Championships. With the country’s top-seeded team in town, and only one spot from British Columbia gaining entry to Nationals, the Chargers took the court in front of a packed royal blue gym as definite underdogs. Camosun went on to win in a four-set thriller, taking home the tournament hardware and earning a No. 1 seed for Nationals in Charlestown, Prince Edward Island.

The Chargers survived the first two rounds, setting up a semi-final showdown with Red Deer College — the defending National Champs, and a bona fide powerhouse squad in each of Finn’s five years in Camosun.

After dropping the first set, the Chargers bounced back to steal the second and third before losing the fourth. The stage was set for a furious finish, with the game’s commentators dubbing it the match of the tournament.

“That was the hardest game I’ve ever played,” Finn recalls. “For us, that was the final.”

In a deciding fifth set, the teams were tied at 13 apiece when Chargers server Alex Sadowski ripped off an ace, setting up the decisive match point. Finn and his Chargers soon capitalized, securing their place in the National Final.

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As clock struck midnight on Jeremy Finn’s phone, the messages began streaming in.

Happy Birthday!

Great Game!

Happy 23rd!

Still buzzing from the semi-final earlier that evening, Finn couldn’t fall asleep. He read a few more messages, placed the phone back on his hotel bedside table, closed his eyed, and tried again.

The last time Camosun qualified for the National Finals, Finn was in Grade 12. In fact, it was the team’s success that season that largely swayed the two-sport star in the first place.

The Chargers faced Quebec’s Cégep Limoilou in the Finals. It was a team Finn had played just once before — a five-set practice match in Victoria three years ago. Camosun had beaten the visitors in straight sets, but agreed to play all five to help make Limoilou’s travels worthwhile. The team from Quebec City was young and raw, but far more loud, energized and confident since the two team’s last met.

“They were a young team,” Finn says. “But their leftsides were just deadly, and their big right side just bombed [the ball].”

Limoilou took Camosun to five sets for the second time in two days.

“It was like an unspoken confidence between the guys on the bench and on the floor,” Finn recalls. “Everybody just came together and banded together and was like ‘enough is enough.’”

Up 11–5 in the deciding set, Macedo set up Finn for a crushing kill. It would be the last kill of his collegiate career. Three points later, the Chargers had won their first-ever National Championship.

“It took me a long time to learn how to play volleyball,” Finn reflects solemnly. “I don’t think I learned to play the way I needed to play until the last three weeks of my career.”

Five years ago, Finn arrived on the Camosun campus like so many first-years do: eager, energetic (often overly so), the world before them a kingdom to conquer. Today, that unbridled ambition has given way to a more laid-back demeanor, coupled with a genuine sense of accomplishment — validation that the decision he’d made, however strange or ill-advised it seemed at the time, was the right one.

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Drained bodies splayed across the bleachers and gym floor. The Camosun Chargers — icing, stretching, chewing on mom’s homemade cookies — were just about the only ones left in the building. Save for the five die-hard parents who flew 4,500 kilometres across Canada to watch their boys bring it home.

After five years at Camosun, it was the last time Finn would sit with his teammates like this; a fitting, bittersweet finale to the up-and-down college career he never thought he’d have. Eventually, exhaustion overwhelmed excitement, and the chatter faded to silence.

Cam Fennema, a six-feet-five fellow leftside, turned to Finn.

“Hey,” Fennema shouted, his voice growing with each word. “It’s your birthday! We just won Nationals!”

Eighteen medal-adorned heads — along with the coaches and trainers — swung in their captain’s direction. Clad in black and red championship tee-shirts, their gold maple-leaf trophy and championship banner standing idly bay, the Chargers filled the gym once more with sound, and sang “Happy Birthday” to their captain.

Finn sat, head down, without a word. He’d been the vocal leader all season, the energy guy tasked with firing his teammates up. But there was nothing left to say. Tears blurred his vision as five years of sweat, spikes, and question marks came to a close.

“If you asked anyone, I was always a basketball player who played volleyball,” Finn tells me over the phone. “I think now I just try my best to identify myself as Jeremy Finn, and not as an athlete in any sport, but a man living life who loves sports.”