ROAD TOWN – St Vin­cent and the Grenadines reigned supreme among the men, while Bermu­da was crowned queens when the East­ern Caribbean Vol­ley­ball As­so­ci­a­tion Cham­pi­onships con­clud­ed in the British Vir­gin Is­lands over the week­end.

St Vin­cent and the Grenadines roared back af­ter los­ing the open­ing set to de­feat Saint Lu­cia 17-25, 25-17, 25-13, 25-22, while Bermu­da women dis­patched An­tigua and Bar­bu­da women 25-23, 27-25, 21-25 25-20 to cap­ture their maid­en ti­tle at the Mul­ti-Pur­pose Sports Com­plex in Tor­to­la on Sun­day night.

Hav­ing fin­ished sec­ond to Saint Lu­cia in the past two edi­tions, Bermu­da head coach Gary LeBlanc was de­light­ed to fi­nal­ly taste gold.

“I am ex­treme­ly proud of the team. I couldn’t be hap­pi­er be­cause they earned the gold medal. I’ve been to many of these tour­na­ments as a play­er as well as a coach and this is my first gold medal.

“Hats off to the op­po­si­tion, they re­al­ly gave us a game. It was point-for-point and we just did our best to dig in and con­tin­ued with our goal,” LeBlanc told the Roy­al Gazette.

“The first two sets were re­al­ly tight, but we were able to pre­vail. We had some things go wrong in the third, [there] were some ques­tion­able calls, but we got through it.

“That’s just typ­i­cal or nor­mal of a tour­na­ment, but it’s the strength of the team to get through that ad­ver­si­ty. This team has re­al­ly worked hard on that and they proved that they could get through it all,” he added.

CMC