The Ottawa Sport Council is pleased to introduce Chris and Kerry MacLean as our latest Community Sport Heroes!
Chris and Kerry founded the Maverick Volleyball Club 40 years ago and are set to retire from their leadership roles after building a cornerstone of the community.
“You walk into any random gym where people are playing volleyball in Ottawa, and I guarantee you will be able to pick somebody that’s wearing something that says Maverick on it,” Mavs’ technical director Jelle Koolijman told the Ottawa Sports Pages in a feature by Farrah Philpot. “In Ottawa, you can’t name [volleyball] without saying Maverick, and you can’t say Maverick without Kerry MacLean.”
Kerry coached nearly 200 teams over his career and mentored thousands of athletes, both with the Mavericks and at Colonel By Secondary School where he taught. Chris, who ran her own business, handled a great deal of the administration behind the scenes, and plans to continue helping the club with branding and communications during a transition period in the coming months.
The couple’s lives have always been filled with volleyball, and each of their three children went on to play post-secondary volleyball and coach.
“It’s a difficult transition because we’ve only known volleyball together,” Chris underlined. “We got married 40 years ago, so there hasn’t been a year without Maverick in our relationship.”
The Maverick Volleyball Club started with a single boys’ and girls’ team composed largely of Kerry’s high school players at Colonel By.
The club now features multiple tiers of teams in each age group, and each year dozens of players graduate on to play university volleyball.
“The generations we’ve nurtured along are now bringing their kids here,” Kerry noted. “We’re getting them involved in coaching, and even if they’re not, what they’re saying is, ‘I want my child to do it too.’”
Jordan Canham, a Maverick alumnus who is now a member of the Canadian men’s NextGen national team program, has maintained a close relationship with his former coach.
“Not just as a volleyball coach, but [Kerry] cared so much about turning us into men who do all the basics of life in general,” Canham underlined. “In volleyball, he was great too, but more like a life coach.”
The Mavs were at the forefront of implementing a long-term athlete development model at the club level, while also creating the Maverick Youth Opportunities Fund to remove barriers to get on the court.
Another Maverick trademark was successfully linking together different levels of volleyball. Its youth high-performance program was developed in consultation with Volleyball Canada’s national team head coach, and there are Maverick fingerprints on the sports-études programs at Franco-Cité and Louis-Riel high schools.
In concert with his role at Colonel By, Kerry helped inspire a culture of collaboration between the club and local high schools, with many scholastic coaches involved with community clubs as well.
Those efforts bore fruit when Carleton University hosted the national championships in 2009 and the Mavericks’ 18U boys won the signature division. Ottawa has since become a regular host of provincial and national championships, bringing several hundred teams to town each year.
In the spring, Kerry was inducted into the Ontario Volleyball Hall of Fame as a builder for his contributions “on the court, in the classroom, and throughout the Ottawa region.”
Kerry said it was an honour to be recognized alongside six other inductees, but added, “I know that mine is mostly because of pure obstinance and sticking with something for a long period of time versus an incredible amount of talent,” he smiled. “I guess in some ways that’s a bit of a talent in itself to stay dedicated.”
The OSC Community Sport Hero features aim to highlight the selfless contributions of dedicated staff, volunteers and sport organizations in Ottawa. Do you know someone dedicated to sport in Ottawa? Help us continue to tell the stories of community sport in Ottawa and nominate a person or organization doing great work in the sport community!