Gavin
Schmitt

When he was 16, Gavin Schmitt experienced a mega growth spurt. Already a tall teen, Schmitt grew seven inches within a year to stand at six-foot-7 during the 11th grade. The extra length tacked onto his limbs proved difficult to maneuver. “Couldn’t really walk and chew gum at the same time so I just laid off of sports for a year,” he said.

When grade 12 rolled around, his mother, Joanne insisted he take up volleyball, remembering how a year earlier, a provincial coach had spotted him ducking through doorways at a hamburger joint and asked him, on the spot, to join the team. At the time, Gavin declined, seeing as he was more concerned with “how to coordinate my body” than spiking a volleyball.

While playing for his high school team, that same coach saw him at a tournament and told him they would develop him into a player. Just three years later he and his 6’10” frame were named to the national team.

Gavin recounts: “I will always remember when I first made the National team in 2007. I did not have a very good tryout and I was thinking I wasn’t going to make the team; then the meeting with Glenn Hoag and the coaches and hearing that I had in fact been selected changed my life,” he indicated.  
 
In 2014 Schmitt led Canada in scoring in six of seven games at the FIVB World Championships as the team finished a best-ever seventh. He was the tournament’s leading scorer at the 2015 Pan Am Games in Toronto, where he notched 25 points in both Canada’s semi-final loss to Argentina and the bronze medal win over Puerto Rico. 

It was also at the Pan Am Games where Schmitt’s ongoing issues with stress fractures reappeared. In the summer of 2013, he had about a dozen stress fractures in his left shin for which he had a rod inserted and held with two screws. Two years later, a small fracture occurred in his right shin. He tried to manage it, but in January 2016 a second identical tibial nailing was performed. He returned to help Canada qualify for Rio 2016 and win the FIVB World League Group 2, earning the team a spot in the elite Group 1 for 2017. 
 
Gavin counts the 2016 Olympic qualification tournament in Japan as a major moment in his career with Team Canada. “Sitting in the room with my teammates and finding out we had qualified for the Olympics is probably the most unforgettable emotional experience I have had in my playing career,” he said.
 
Within the volleyball world, Schmitt has literally been all over the map. He’s played in six different countries over a span of 10 years, collecting life experiences that colour a successful pro career playing professionally in Greece, France, Turkey, Russia, and South Korea. In Greece, his first year as a pro, a spectator threw a beer can onto the court, halting the match and resulting in a riot.  From 2009 – 2012, Schmitt played for the Daejeon Samsung Bluefangs in South Korea’s V-League, where he led the team to three consecutive titles winning the MVP award in the 2009-10 and 2011-12 seasons. In South Korea, where volleyball is huge, a 16-year-old girl gave him a hand-written note, asking him to marry her in two years.

Gavin credits his coaches at the university and college coaches at the college and university levels as well as with the National Team for working with him to build him into a player who was able to make the national team and become a key factor in building the program into a top 10 team in the world.

We are honoured today to induct Gavin Schmitt as an athlete in the Volleyball Canada Hall of Fame; he is most certainly deserving of this recognition for his contributions a key player on Team Canada and for his remarkable international career.