Nicholas Clarke

Chan­non Thomp­son is the face of lo­cal vol­ley­ball. At just 19, she is al­ready a five year vet­er­an of the se­nior na­tion­al team and is set to be a key fig­ure in its 2014 FIVB World Cham­pi­onship cam­paign.

Warm­ing up for the road to Italy, she dom­i­nat­ed the NORCE­CA Women's Sec­ond Round Group I qual­i­fiers in St Au­gus­tine last week, lead­ing T&T to a gold while tak­ing home awards for Best Scor­er, Best Strik­er, Best Serv­er and Most Valu­able Play­er. She was in ac­tion again over the week­end in the Caribbean Vol­ley­ball League, help­ing UTT sucess­ful­ly de­fend its ti­tle and earn­ing an­oth­er MVP tro­phy.

Be­fore her match against Tech­nocrats on Thurs­day, in which she would score 14 points in a straight set vic­to­ry, Thomp­son spoke to the Guardian about her de­ci­sion to choose a vol­ley­ball ca­reer over fur­ther­ing her ed­u­ca­tion, her re­la­tion­ship with her team­mates, and why her sport is on the fringe of a spike in pop­u­lar­i­ty in T&T.

Men­tion vol­ley­ball to Thomp­son and it will trig­ger a smile. Hav­ing tried swim­ming and run­ning, she found her call­ing at 13 when she joined the Star­lings Club, im­me­di­ate­ly de­vel­op­ing a pas­sion to be the best.

"What's not to love about vol­ley­ball?" she asks. "Every el­e­ment of it is amaz­ing and fun. There's an adren­a­line rush both on and off the court and it's so in­tense that you can look on and see all the play­ers' emo­tions and feel con­nect­ed to them. I love it."

With­in a year, she was rep­re­sent­ing her coun­try along­side play­ers twice her age.

"I still am the youngest play­er on the team but it's al­ways been some­thing I'm used to. It wasn't so bad be­cause we have a friend­ly group of girls who helped me to feel com­fort­able and de­vel­op my skills. For me, it was more like look­ing at them as role mod­els and not be­ing afraid of them."

Af­ter fin­ish­ing Form Five at St Joseph's Con­vent San Fer­nan­do, Thomp­son opt­ed to pur­sue a pro­fes­sion­al ca­reer, sign­ing a three-year con­tract with the Pol­ish club AZS Bi­a­lystok.

"It's not some­thing that every­body will agree with, but that's one of the things that re­al­ly mo­ti­vates me to suc­ceed; to prove to peo­ple that I made a good de­ci­sion. I have seen the stan­dard of liv­ing which vol­ley­ball can bring and it dri­ves me to work hard."

Thomp­son be­lieves that big things are in store for the cur­rent crop of na­tion­al play­ers though she not­ed they would need more than com­mit­ment and tal­ent to com­pete with the best in the world.

"There's just not enough fund­ing," she point­ed out. "The na­tion­al team has to fight for train­ing time, gym time and ther­a­py. Every­body needs time to be able to work on their per­son­al game, but when you have four hours max­i­mum per day, you can't do that... Once we have those things our vol­ley­ball will im­prove be­cause we al­ready have the ex­per­tise of the coach­es it's just a mat­ter of be­ing able to im­ple­ment them with the prop­er fa­cil­i­ties."

On a pos­i­tive note, she said she had wit­nessed an in­creased in­ter­est in the sport in re­cent times, spurred on by tele­vi­sion cov­er­age and the in­tro­duc­tion of school pro­grammes across the coun­try.

"TV is build­ing aware­ness. It's a beau­ti­ful sport so all we re­al­ly need is ex­po­sure. Once peo­ple come out and see what it's about, I think they will de­vel­op a pas­sion for it."

T&T's women are cur­rent­ly ranked 32nd in the FIVB Se­nior World Rank­ing though Thomp­son aims to take them in to the top five by the time she re­tires. She is look­ing for­ward to mak­ing the jour­ney with her close knit team­mates.

"We are a fam­i­ly. We've been train­ing for sev­er­al years and both on and off the court we have a con­nec­tion. Like fam­i­ly, we have our dis­agree­ments but what's im­por­tant is that we've al­ways been able to work past them, un­der­stand each oth­er bet­ter and not al­low our ex­ter­nal prob­lems to af­fect us on the court."