September 5, 2024: The Canadian women’s sitting volleyball team will compete for the bronze medal at the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games after falling 3-0 (25-16, 25-22, 25-18) to the undefeated Team China in the semifinals today. 

"Obviously, the outcome 3-0 is not what we wanted," Canada's head coach Nicole Ban said. "But even from the beginning, we battled. We knew it was going to be a really difficult game and I just talked to the athletes about focusing on one point at a time. I thought they did that every single point, and that's really hard to do.

"It's easy to get caught up in what just happened and the error that just happened, but we just moved on to what was happening next, and I'm really, really proud of them for that. We battled, we did what we could. It wasn't enough, but I'm super proud of them."

Albertan Sarah Melenka led the way for Canada with 12 points, with four coming off of blocks. Team captain Danielle Ellis and Heidi Peters each had 11 points. Ellis is tied in second in the entire tournament for points with 60 and Melenka is fifth with 48. Jolan Wong is currently the top-ranked libero in the Games with a 1.54 average per set in-play rate with just seven errors in the tournament so far, the lowest of any libero with at least 50 attempts.

"Our goal was to go out there and put everything that we had on the court," outside hitter Julie Kozun said. “I think we were scratching the surface of our best volleyball, but we weren't quite playing our best volleyball. We weren't able to serve receive as well today, which didn't able to us to play our best systems.

"We can run a faster ball than we played today, but China is a tough competitor, so it's nice to play a high-level volleyball with a high-level team, but I think we had more in the tank, and we just weren't able to execute on it today.”

Canada has a record of 2-2 at the 2024 Paralympics so far, defeating Slovenia 3-0 (25-11, 25-21, 25-12) and Rwanda 3-0 (25-14, 25-17, 25-13), while dropping a match to Brazil 3-1 (25-20, 25-21, 23-25, 25-19) in pool play.

The Canadian women will battle a familiar foe in Brazil for the bronze medal on September 7 (Saturday) at 3 pm local time. Team China and Team USA will compete for the gold medal at 7:30 pm local time.

Full schedule and results: paralympic.org and World ParaVolley

Team Canada: paralympic.ca
Watch the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games on CBC Sports: cbc.ca/sports/paralympics

Media attaché in Paris: Courtney Killion

Photo: World ParaVolley

Volleyball Canada Media Contact:
Jackie Skender
jskender@volleyball.ca
Mobile: 613-794-7676