Hello beautiful humans! My name is Kyla.

If you’ve landed here because you know me from a volleyball gym on Vancouver Island, from something I’ve written or rambled about on Instagram, or because your kid has somehow ended up in one of my gyms, there are probably a few chapters of this story you missed.

Volleyball was my life for a very long time. I spent five years playing at UBC during one of the strongest stretches in the program’s history, where we won five consecutive National Championships. From there, volleyball took me around the world. I played professionally in Italy, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Greece, Indonesia, Germany, Peru, France and Puerto Rico, living out of suitcases, meeting some of my favourite humans and learning pretty quickly that professional sport is both exactly as incredible and significantly less glamorous than it looks from the outside.

Through all of it, Team Canada was the constant. I spent more than a decade representing our Women’s National Team, eventually captaining and co-captaining the program, playing in three World Championships and earning 143 caps for Canada. And for so much of that time, one goal sat above everything else: qualifying for the Olympic Games. That goal shaped where I played, how I trained, the summers I gave up, the injuries I played through and so many of the decisions I made throughout my career. We were part of a generation of Canadian women trying desperately to push the program forward and get Canada back onto the Olympic stage. We didn’t ultimately get there during my playing career, and I think there will probably always be a little ache attached to that, but I am incredibly proud of what we poured into that program and the small part we played in continuing to move it forward.

Even while I was still playing, there was always a part of me drawn to the athletes coming up behind us. Whenever I had the opportunity, I’d head into club gyms, talk to teams, work with younger players or mentor athletes who reached out. I certainly wasn’t thinking that one day I’d come back and work in youth volleyball — I was very much still living inside my own career — but looking back now, I can see little pieces of what I’m doing today scattered throughout those years.

It’s also where this website began.

Many, many moons ago, while I was still playing for Team Canada, I became increasingly frustrated by how little media coverage our Women’s National Team received. We were training year-round, travelling the world, competing internationally and trying desperately to build something, and very few people at home knew who these women were, never mind what we were doing.

So I started writing.

At first, this space was a way to highlight my fabulous teammates and share our trainings, travels and competitions. I always had a journal with me anyway, but through the blog came an unexpected sense of responsibility to tell our side of the story — to advocate for my teammates and myself, to show people how hard we were working and to give people a window into what we were trying to accomplish.

Somewhere along the way, though, it became about a lot more than volleyball. Writing became a place where I could be fully me. Fully seen. A place to talk about what life was handing me both on and off the court. There were the enormous highs and lows of elite sport, but there was also very real life happening behind them. In 2013, my family lost my younger brother Connor in a tragic accident. Grief cracked our family open, and writing became one of the ways I tried to make sense of something that didn’t make any sense at all. I had this relentless need to open up pieces of myself through words — to talk about the things we so often keep quiet and put language around the messy parts of life while I was still trying to figure them out myself.

And then, eventually, I stopped.

Life got busy. Volleyball got busy. And this little corner of the internet sat mostly untouched while I went off and lived what now feels like several entirely different lives.

Rudy and I played our final professional seasons in 2020/21 in Paris, France — somehow the first time in our careers that we were both playing professionally, at the same time, in the same place. After years of coordinating seasons, countries and long stretches of long distance, we finally got one together. And because apparently playing professional volleyball during a pandemic wasn’t enough to keep us occupied, we spent that entire season building a wine business back home at the same time.

Yes. While playing in France.

When we landed back in Canada that spring, it was boots on the ground. We started Valley Commons Winery from the ground up — branding, marketing, wine labels, leasing vineyards in the Okanagan, building a team and figuring out an industry that was very different from the one we had just spent our entire adult lives in. Eventually, we acquired Stoneboat Vineyards and Winery as well, so somewhere in the transition from professional athletes to “retired life,” we found ourselves fully responsible for a team and two growing wine brands. Valley Commons had a tasting room at the District Wine Village in Oliver, plus a bistro and tasting room in Fort Langley where we were living, while Stoneboat had — and still has! — its home vineyards and tasting room on Black Sage Road in Oliver. And for the record, some of the best Pinot you’ll ever have.

There wasn’t exactly a gentle transition into retirement, and for the first time in most of our adult lives, we were almost completely removed from volleyball.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that, we also decided to become parents. Halfway through my pregnancy with Mackie, though, life changed again when my brilliant and wonderful Dad passed away suddenly in 2021. Losing Dad brought me right back to a place I knew all too well. Our family was once again treading water and picking up the pieces, trying to understand how life could change so completely and so quickly.

Dad had also always been my biggest writing advocate. He was the first person to read anything I posted and was always nudging me to write more. He loved that I wrote, and somewhere in the years after losing him I started feeling that pull toward it again — picking up the keyboard, so to speak, knowing how happy it would have made Dad, but also slowly remembering how happy it made me.

Mackie arrived in 2022, and life kept moving, as it somehow always does.

Three years into our wine adventure, one Mackie later and with a Wesley on the way, life decided it was time for another pivot. Rudy had an inkling that he wanted to become a firefighter and, not surprisingly if you know Rudy, once he decided he was going to do it, he did it. The process itself took almost a full year — prerequisites, training, applications and different halls that were hiring — but eventually we found ourselves choosing between opportunities in Coquitlam and Nanaimo.

We chose Nanaimo.

So we packed up another version of our life and headed for Vancouver Island. Wesley arrived in 2024, Rudy became a firefighter, we settled into Nanaimo — and almost immediately, volleyball started creeping back into our lives. Rudy and I started playing co-ed together through VIU (which was hilariously rough in the beginning), and around the same time I was asked to join the Board of Directors for Mariners Volleyball Club. I had known Chris Densmore since my UBC days, and what started as me wanting to peek inside the gym and see what the club was all about very quickly became something much bigger.

I fell in love with it (…again). With the coaches, the athletes, and getting to watch these kids navigate their own journeys through competitive sport. One thing led to another — as it apparently always does around here — and these days I oversee the women’s side of our club volleyball program, run Sunday Train + Plays for younger athletes, coach a club team myself, and run position-specific training for club athletes throughout the year.

Somewhere in all of that, I started writing and talking about volleyball again too, but this time from a completely different perspective.

I’m not the professional athlete trying to earn a contract or the national team captain trying to help push a program toward the Olympics. I’ve now been the young athlete, university player, professional, teammate, captain, mentor and coach — and I’m also a mom watching my own kids begin to find their way into sport. There are so many things I understand now that I desperately wish I had understood then.

So I’m talking about them.

Development. Playing time. Confidence. Recruiting. Team dynamics. Coaching. Mental health. Identity outside of sport. Parent-athlete relationships. Winning and losing. Resilience. The obsession with exposure. What actually matters when you’re 14 versus what feels like it matters when you’re 14. And what it takes to stay in sport long enough to find out how good you can actually become.

A lot of the people finding me now know this version of me first. Coach Kyla. The woman standing in a Mariners gym talking about development and telling your kid that making mistakes is quite literally the point. The person on Instagram with an opinion about club volleyball. The one reminding athletes that the best 15-year-old isn’t necessarily going to be the best 25-year-old.

And I kind of love that, because there was a stretch of my life when I genuinely thought volleyball might simply become something I used to do.

If the last ten years have taught me anything, it’s that very little in life is actually set in stone. You can have the long-term plan. You can be absolutely certain you know where you’re headed. And then you retire from the thing that defined most of your life, build a winery, become a mom, lose people you love, watch your husband become a firefighter, move to an Island — and somehow find yourself standing in a volleyball gym again wondering how the hell you got there.

Life has humbled me enough times that I’m no longer particularly interested in pretending I know exactly what comes next. And I think this space gets to reflect that.

There will be a lot of volleyball here. Probably more than there used to be, because apparently after taking a few years away from the sport I came back with A LOT of thoughts. There will be conversations for athletes, parents and coaches. There will be things I learned from playing at the highest levels of our sport and things I’m learning now from standing on the other side of the net.

But this still isn’t just a volleyball website.

There will be motherhood. Family. Grief. Life after professional sport. Entrepreneurship. Things I’m learning. Things I’m questioning. Things I probably have no business having such strong opinions about. And sometimes whatever has been sitting in my Notes app long enough that I finally decide to say it out loud.

Because volleyball is a huge part of my story. It just isn’t the whole story.

And maybe that’s what this website has actually been about all along — the plans, the pivots, the really hard parts, the really good parts, and all the life that happens somewhere in between.

So buckle up, kids. We’re still sharing it all.

Welcome here. ❤️