Built for Defence
For Arvin Carandang the gym isn’t a social club. Removing one ear-bud, he smiles and nods at a fellow patron that popped into frame to say hello. As he returns it to his ear, the blaring trumpets of the rocky theme song replace the din of the busy training facility. Finding a secluded area, he pulls out his phone and selects his self-designed workout consisting of three exercises focussing on speed and power. Each exercise is performed for 30 seconds at maximum effort. On around the fifth rotation of the iconic song, the effort is there but performance is harder to come by. It’s at the stage where he says he envisions a drill sergeant screaming in his ear. As an alarm sounds from his phone’s external speakers, he gets one last swing at the wall with a 15-pound medicine ball. After a 30 second rest, he begins his last set of lunges. Rising up from his first rep, his legs shake and his breath can be heard catching in his throat. It’s the exact conditions he’s aiming to create and in the final seconds it’s no longer his music or a fictitious drill sergeant that urges him on. It’s his own voice, yelling, “come on,” as he rises up from his final lunge.
It’s the kind of fortitude that goes a long way on the goalball court, especially on the defensive end. Like most sports, the defensive side of the ball isn’t the most popular. For Carandang, the mental toughness he exudes both off and on the court is inextricably tied to his competitive nature. It’s how he’s transformed himself into a defensive specialist for the Ontario All Blacks. While he’ll modestly explain that he just doesn’t like to be scored on, stopping a shot in his sport, let alone enjoying it, takes more than he lets on.
The entire game is played blindfolded, which evens the playing field for players with varying forms of visual impairment. Carandang was born with leber congenital amaurosis. “It basically means I can’t see that well,” Carandang says. His nonchalant explanation of his impairment is indicative of how important it is in Goalball. “When the eyeshades come on, you forget that you have a disability,” he explains.
Even so, the adjustment to complete darkness wasn’t easy. “When I first started, I’m not going to lie, it scared the living daylights out of me,” Carandang says. “It still hurts but it’s part of the game now.”
The pain he’s referring to isn’t the sting from your average volleyball. A goalball weighs three pounds. Contributing to that weight is a bell located inside the ball that allows players to track it on defense. It’s thrown in a bowling motion and can reach speeds of up to 65 kilometres an hour. The three players on each team defend a nine-metre wide net. Positioning themselves in a side plank in front of the goal, they make their dive based on what they hear.
photo credit: Andrew Holland
But there isn’t much time to react (six-tenths of a second on average). Rob Christy, who coaches Carandang on the Ontario All Blacks, explained how some aren’t up to the task. “There are guys who are afraid of getting hit by the ball,” Christy says. “You have to be mentally tougher to be a rock solid defensive player and you have to commit your body.”
But Carandang has done more than overcome that initial fear. As a certified personal trainer, he’s customized his workouts specifically for his sport. What makes him unique is his ability to defend at all three positions on the court—a role that most would find uncomfortable. “I can’t move to my left,” Christy, a former player himself admits. “The challenge is to train your body to go away from what it naturally wants to do.”
Comfortable is the last word you would use to describe Carandang’s work ethic. Training a minimum of five days a week, he focuses on speed, power and endurance. His go-to workout is high intensity interval training, which is quite gruelling. Yet, even off the court, without an opponent in sight, Carandang employs his competitive nature. “Every day that I skip training, that’s one more day that the other guy is training and getting better than me,” Carandang says.
While always competitive, Arvin Carandang wasn’t always athletic. Arvin’s mother, Nida Carandang, explained that it wasn’t until he enrolled at the W. Ross MacDonald School for the blind at the age of eight, that he even attempted sports. There he tried his hand at both judo and wrestling. When he was introduced to goalball however, no other sports compared. “Goalball is his life,” Nida Carandang says.
It’s that passion for goalball that’s always driven him. Christy remembers seeing Arvin play when he was younger and less seasoned. “He would want things so badly that it would bring him to tears,” he explained. Now, Christy says he’s learned to harness that passion. It’s evident in his work ethic and his defensive effort on the court. It’s what has earned him the position of captain on his team and makes him exemplary. “If I could take just a piece of Arv and put it in all of my other athletes, we’d be unstoppable,” Christy says.
