Despite making the decision to “move on” from volleyball after five seasons with the Lethbridge Polytechnic Kodiaks, landing “an amazing opportunity” to work in the institution’s Be Fit for Life Centre, coaching youth volleyball teams almost every evening, and helping athletes as a sport performance coach at the Lethbridge Fitness Club, Jamie Brown (Exercise Science 2023, Natural Resource Compliance 2020) still felt like something was missing.
“I could not get over the feeling that my time as an athlete wasn’t over, and there was more I could achieve,” she says. So, Brown reached out to her agent in the spring of 2024 and expressed her interest in playing professionally. She was signed to the agency and within a month she had connected with a coach in Sweden and signed a contract with Engelholms Volleybollsällskap.
“It has been very rewarding, and also very challenging, to be on a team where everyone holds each other to a very high standard and expects excellence,” says Brown. “I have been pushed out of my comfort zone by my teammates and coaches, which is helping me enhance my volleyball IQ. Volleyball is a very complex sport, so it has been challenging to learn new systems with new teammates.”
Brown says her time on the Kodiaks women’s volleyball team taught her how to be a good teammate and how to create a positive, winning culture. She also says the emphasis on the program’s three pillars of academic accountability, athletic excellence and student-athlete experience showed her there are many components to being a successful high-performance athlete.
Brown says she cherishes every moment she had as a Kodiak and she’ll still be cheering on the volleyball teams this season, just from 7,000 kilometres away.
“Now that I’m here, I have to keep pinching myself and reminding myself that playing volleyball is my job now,” she says. “How cool is that?”
