Heavy-hitting Aurora volleyball player Stephen Maar is relishing his new role as a leader on the Canadian men’s national team, as he competes in his second Olympics.
Maar made his Olympics debut in Tokyo, and now aged 29, Maar is one of only three players who are returning to play in Paris 2024.
“I’m 29 now, whereas I was one of the younger guys, I was about 25 at the time (of Tokyo),” he said. “So it was a bit of a different role, but now it's a different experience for me, so that’s pretty cool actually. It’s actually a very different feel.”
While with age comes experience, it also presents challenges. The six foot-seven-inch heavy hitter has had injury troubles in the past, tearing his ankle at the start of his third year playing at McMaster University, which nearly forced him to stop playing entirely.
“I think at the end, it was you make of it. Right now I’m having to focus a lot more on my body. It’s a bit more physically taxing when you’re a bit older in this sport,” he said.
Maar was born in Scarborough, but moved to Aurora when at Grade 4, where he first started playing volleyball.
He credits a “great gym teacher” he had at Regency Acres Public School and his older brother for getting him into the sport.
“So I started playing pretty fast, both volleyball and basketball,” he said. “I actually started getting decently tall at a young age and started getting good at it."
He began focusing on volleyball around age 13, playing with the Aurora-based Storm Volleyball Club and at Bill Crothers Secondary School in Unionville, before playing at McMaster University from 2013 to 2016.
Maar made his first Canada team debut in 2015 and started playing professionally in 2016, mainly in Italy.
Last time out at the Tokyo Olympic Games, Canada finished in eighth place. The team has been together for several months, going on a tour for 10 days leading up to moving into the Olympic Village in Paris.
While some athletes have voiced some concerns with the accommodation in the village, Maar has not had any problems.
“I’ve just got little cardboard extenders on the cardboard beds, they’re actually not that bad they’re just a bit firm, depends on what you think personally,” he said. “They were good this time, all the guys on our team. So before we were even moved in, everyone had specifically assigned beds, assigned everything, so they’d taken care of that.”
Canada drew a challenging pool, playing against Slovenia, France and Serbia. Maar said the hope for the team is to make it out of the pool and into the quarter-finals.
“The team’s been improving quite a bit,” he said. “We’ve built a good level of momentum right now so we're feeling really good for the match and for the tournament. We’ll just kind of of let it pass one match at a time, we have a really difficult pool but it will be good to get those teams out of the way early on.”
Canada played its opening game of the Olympics against Slovenia on July 28, losing by three sets to one.
They play next on July 30 against France.