1999 Australian Masters Volleyball Championships

Having played the last "few" Masters Championships with Ballarat Phantoms, Gus decided to "put the band back together" for this year's event. Before the men's Honours team had their first big player turnover of this decade in 1992, the team had been reasonably unchanged since about '87 (except for a few imported Chinese and Korean setters). Although the names will mean very little to this generation of Renegades, they were (and some still are) all members of a very successful era of our men's Honours team.

Gus started planning this well in advance and by the first training in March had managed to get a commitment from ten of the twelve members of that squad. As we stepped onto the court for our "first" practice match together against the Melbourne Uni. representative team, it was a strangely eerie feeling taking our line up and trying to remember who did what and played where. We were walloped in the first set which was excusable I guess as only four of the eleven in the team were still playing any competitive indoor volleyball and four of them hadn't touched a ball in five years. By the end of the day however, it was all coming back and that first set would be the only bad volleyball we would play for the next month. Trainings proceeded well each Sunday and, come the tournament, we had managed to still have an uninjured team of eleven which, in itself was a minor miracle (it probably had a bit to do with not playing soccer for warm-up as all our injuries used to come from a rather contact version of code).

[img_assist|fid=83|thumb=0|alt=Renegades Masters team, 1999|class=image-legacy]

The event was scheduled over the four days of Easter with two round games on each of the first three days and the finals on the Monday. The team was entered into the 30-35 years section as we had four youngsters in this age group which stopped the others playing in the 35-40 category. During the rounds we kicked everybody's arse including a team from Canberra with three ex-national team players. The guys just got better as the tournament went on and there was even a time during one of the games when Gus laughed during a rally (as witnessed by Dave Martin and Amir). We were having fun and winning and realised that this must have been Les' (our club President then and now) great vision all those years ago. Big Andre (a 6'7" ex-Polish national league player) was still hitting angles which defied physics, Slugger was everywhere in backcourt, Karl ran tirelessly through the middle, Dickie blocked everything, Gus was Gus and Spike was Spike, and Radar, Phil and Shazzy came off the bench to do their job.

Come the final on Monday we were ready! We pumped North Sydney 3-0 in a rather embarrassingly one sided final to win the gold medal. It was like very little had changed over ten years except for the majority of our supporters were under five years old - fourteen of them to be exact, and with their mums, of which most of the players went home with after the game instead of to the pub.

Thank you to all the Renegades who came down to support us over the four days and, hopefully, we inspired them to play "the Masters" when they are old enough.