Duff had enough of travelling world with national team

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This article was published 11/08/2020 (1905 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Canadian men’s volleyball team should have been at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics the past few weeks, trying to build off its success four years ago at the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro when the national squad defeated powerhouses Italy and the United States in group play.

The global COVID-19 pandemic changed all that. But even if the Olympics are staged next year, Justin Duff won’t be there — and the Winnipegger is fine with that.

Last summer, Duff decided his days of blocking the best power hitters in the world were over. After 10 years with the national team program, he made the difficult decision to leave the team.

Originally, the 6-7 middle who grew up in the Maples was all in on helping Canada qualify for the Tokyo Games, but he wasn’t happy with his game. In addition to that, his now-wife Kelly was pregnant and working full time in Ottawa while he travelled the world as a pro athlete.

He knew it was time to think about someone other than the guy whose name adorned the back of his jersey.

“I came back here and saw she was by herself and working full time and (thought), ‘Well, if this isn’t working out so well over here and I’m not helping this team, what more am I willing to sacrifice for this dream?’ I have a lot of good that I can do here just by being present,” Duff said this week.

The couple and their baby girl, Delphine, live in London, Ont.

“We were supposed to leave for Iran the next day in the morning and I was like, ‘You know what? I actually just can’t get on that flight. I don’t want to.’ So I had to talk to (Canada head coach) Glenn (Hoag) and say, ‘Hey, sorry, I can’t do it.’ It was hard and it seemed like a quick decision, but it was definitely something that had built up for a while.”

A few months later, the former University of Winnipeg Wesmen star retired from the sport after having a similar conversation with his pro team in Istanbul, Turkey. Determined to hit the books again after nearly a decade away from the classroom, Duff, 32, had interviewed for the MBA program at Ivey Business School at Western University while he was in Turkey with his club, Galatasaray, and once he got word he had been accepted he packed his bags for good.

The oldest of three sons raised by a single mom, the player nicknamed ‘The Duffman’ had a heck of a journey. He was named an all-Canadian and U of W’s male athlete of the year in 2010 before playing in seven different countries as a pro and more than 40 while suiting up for the national squad.

It’s a life many athletes might find difficult to leave in the rear-view mirror.

“For me, it was almost like a blessing that my wife was pregnant because, well, not only that it was sweet that she was pregnant and we have a beautiful daughter now, but because it gives you that extra pressure to figure something out,” said Duff, who plans on getting into management consulting once he completes his MBA.

“You don’t have time to have an identity crisis. You need to be productive immediately and that just made things easy. I had no time to mope on the couch or think about what could’ve been, I needed to be building a future.”

That future includes volleyball to some extent. While living in Ottawa, he started a company called DuffSport where he leads volleyball skill development camps for adults. It’s on hold owing to COVID-19 restrictions and with Duff focused on his schooling.

“My idea was to target adults because I knew there were a lot of opportunities for youth to learn and develop their volleyball skills, but there’s almost no programming for adults in any sport other than, you know, your rec league or your beer league,” he said. “You can play, but you’re never able to train or improve. I wanted to have an opportunity to have these people work on their individual skills so that maybe they get 100 reps instead of three and when they go back to their leagues, they’re just able to have a lot more fun playing volleyball.”

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Duff and the rest of Team Canada lost to Russia in the quarter-finals in Rio, so he has no Olympic medal to show for his long tenure with the program. But he was, undoubtedly, a major part of its rebuild — including its credibility on the international scene.

“My first year no one wanted to play with us. We went to Australia once in the summer. We didn’t play a lot of matches. But by the end, we were involved in every international tournament,” Duff said.

“We were getting invited by Poland, by France, by Brazil, really, these top-five teams in the world, to scrimmage with them and get ready to play. It was nice to just feel that. Not only did we have the results to show that we were improving, but the mood around the world became ‘Oh yeah, Canada is worthwhile to play with.’”

taylor.allen@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @TaylorAllen31

Taylor Allen
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Eighteen years old and still in high school, Taylor got his start with the Free Press on June 1, 2011. Well, sort of...

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