Few athletes heading off to a championship event like to admit that they are just “happy to be there,” but for one member of the Capilano Blues women’s volleyball team, “happy” barely begins to describe what she is feeling on the eve of her first ever PacWest championships.
Technically, Isabela Lima is a first-year player on the Blues, but she’s been around this team for more than three years waiting for her chance to play in the championship tournament. Tomorrow she’ll be in the starting lineup when the Blues square off against Columbia Bible College at the University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford, and she won’t just be happy to be there. She’ll be overjoyed, ecstatic, downright euphoric.
“I’m ready to go, I’m so excited,” Lima told the North Shore News Monday a few minutes before hitting the court for one of the team’s final tune-up practices. “I’m more excited than ever.”
When you’ve had nearly everything taken away from you, every little step back feels like a giant leap. And Lima is ready to make her biggest leap yet.
The story of how a Brazilian volleyball player ended up at Capilano begins with an interesting twist of fate. Lima came to Canada to play for another school, Thompson Rivers University, but through volleyball connections it was Capilano head coach Cal Wohlford who picked her up at the airport and drove her to the TRU campus in Kamloops. When TRU didn’t work out for Lima, Wohlford was more than willing to offer a spot on the team for his hitchhiker.
“Everything just worked out and I ended up at Cap,” said Lima.
The Capilano connection, however, quickly came to a very scary end. In the fall of 2015, her first month on the team, the Blues were on a road trip to California when Lima started to feel ill. The exact cause of the illness is still a mystery, although the best guess is that it came from a shell she stepped on while playing beach volleyball on the trip. Whatever it was, it ripped through her body quite quickly. When the team came back to North Vancouver to prepare for the PacWest season, Lima found herself struggling more and more each practice, each day.
“You see your body gradually going down,” she said. “Every day would be not being able to run as much, not being able to breathe as strong, not being able to jump as high. All these small things – they just hurt. They hurt, too, mentally. I didn’t know what was going on.”
She was hospitalized in North Vancouver, got checked and was sent home, told she had a blood infection that would be OK. She was not OK.
“The next morning I woke up paralyzed.”
From there it was straight to Vancouver General Hospital, with members of her family frantically rushing from Brazil to Canada. Six days in hospital followed. There was still no definitive explanation for her condition, and so she and her family packed up her life and took her back to Brazil. Less than a month into her first season with the team, and she was gone.
“It was emotional. It was hard,” Wohlford said of what it was like to watch this healthy young player now fighting just to make simple body movements. “It’s kind of heart-wrecking, right? You see her each couple of days moving less and less. When she left on her final day she stopped by to say goodbye to everyone and she was in a wheelchair.”
Wohlford believed he’d never see Lima again, at least not wearing a Capilano Blues uniform. Lima felt the same way.
“It was just a shock for me,” she said. “I spent the last six months getting ready for this, and it seemed like my dream was just falling. Everything was just falling apart. … I thought it was the last time I’d be able to play volleyball.”
Back in Brazil Lima went straight to hospital and underwent 160 tests on the first day.
“Thank God my mom had the insurance to put me in a private hospital in Brazil, which is one of the best in the world,” she said. She was put on anti-viral drugs, morphine – slowly she started to get a little bit better, regaining movement here and there.
By December she was still limping and in a lot of pain, but she was feeling well enough to make a rather shocking decision – she was going back to Capilano. And not for next year. Now.
“I wanted to start school in January,” she said. It took her many more months before she gathered the physical strength and mental courage to enter the gym again, but when she did she was welcomed back with open arms by the Blues. It started with one practice a week, then two. Wohlford was a constant source of support, as was Cary Manns, billed as Capilano’s team performance advisor, who spent every practice helping Lima go through the simplest of drills and movements, baby steps prescribed to her by her team of physios and medical professionals. It was exactly what she needed, said Lima.
“It was everything! I was here every day. The girls were helping me not only physically, but also mentally. To have a team to support you and lift you up is crucial. It’s vital even for your personal life, to have friends.”
The care she felt on the Capilano campus not only got her going on the court again, it also got her going in life.
“Having all that support I think was the main thing that helped me go back to volleyball,” she said. “I think that was kind of the base of what I needed back then, the support of people I loved.”
At the start of this season, two years after she’d fallen ill, Lima finally stepped back onto the court for a match as an official member of the Capilano Blues. Ready or not.
“It was a little scary,” she said of that first game back last September. “It was like, ‘whoa, what is going to happen now. It’s actually happening.’”
Wohlford started to slowly integrate her into the lineup, gradually increasing her time on the court as she played both libero and outside hitter. It’s been a smashing success.
“We did little by little, and now she’s able to play a full match,” he said. “She’s a competitive person and she does a great job. She’s one of our starters, she’s one of the players that the other side is worried about.”
Lima ended up playing in all 24 of the team’s regular season matches, ranking third on the team in total kills and second in digs.
“She’s one of the best passers on the team,” said Wohlford. “She’s very loud and very encouraging on the court. She’s got a lot of passion.”
The provincials start tomorrow – Lima’s first – and she is ready to help her Blues go for gold.
“I feel very confident,” she said. “I feel that from the amount of practices and workouts I’ve had, I feel that my body is ready to go, and that’s what I wanted to have by provincials.”
Getting her body back to the point where she trusts it to do what her mind was asking it to do was the key to her whole recovery, said Lima.
“What I had was very physical, so I feel that having my body and my mind ready to go and having a mindset of let’s win and let’s do this, it’s crucial,” she said, adding that her passion for the game – to play with her friends – has never been higher. “All these girls are awesome. I just get to have fun with them and to play what we love to play and be passionate about it and just jump in there.”
Wohlford has watched his player fight for nearly two and a half years to get back to this point.
“It shows a lot of her character as a person,” he said. “She still goes to her physio and does her drills and rehab consistently. She’s a very determined individual. It’s nice to see a younger person that’s had something happen to them and not go ‘woe is me.’ She’s just like, ‘alright, that happened. I’m going to fight this.’”
Meanwhile Lima said she is not happy just to be here. She wants a medal.
“We are getting the medals!” she said.
It’s obvious, though, that she’s not just happy to be here. She’s overjoyed.
“It’s like someone gave me a fresh new start, another chance to pursue something that I always wanted, and with a fresh new body, a fresh new mind. Every time you go through something serious like that, it changes you. Your mind changes, the way you think about the world around you changes. I just started being more grateful about small things. You just put more joy into your life.”
