Ina Orat rallies on the court

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By: John Bauer

McMaster has been drawing international students for most of its more than 125 year history. Among them are those who represent the Marauders and their home countries both on the scoresheet and in the classroom.

Volleyball teammates on the court and good friends off it, Ina Onat and Nicole Goricanec have taken roundabout journeys from living abroad to home games at Burridge Gymnasium. They tell their stories in this two-part series.

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Some athletes, it seems, are born wearing a uniform. You can tell they are going far from the very first time they hold the ball in their hands. This is not one of those stories.

Ina Onat was born in Brampton, Ont. to a Turkish father and a Canadian mother, and moved to Turkey in the fifth grade. She was first introduced to volleyball in grade school. Onat remembers her troubles the first time she stepped onto the court.

“I sucked at volleyball in gym class,” she said.

But when her father asked her about it, she told him, “Dad, I want to get better at it.”

If there is one adjective that comes to mind when you listen to Onat tell her story, it is “defiance.” Not in a rude, trouble-making sense, but a defiance of any obstacle that life throws in her path.

Her father signed her up for a local team to help her develop her skills, and the rest is history.

“From there it just kept going and then it came to a point where I was like, ‘I can't stop, I've been doing this for so long,’” she said.

Her Obstacles

Life threw her a cruel twist of fate in her final year at Westmount Secondary School. Onat had moved back to Ontario after five years in Turkey, starting her Canadian high school experience in grade ten. In her last year, Onat was looking to get recruited to play volleyball in the United States. Over the span of a year, she suffered multiple concussions in a series of freak accidents. Volleyballs to the head, getting hit by loose furniture in a car as the driver slammed on the breaks, and other mishaps began to wear on the normally upbeat Onat.

“Basically there was a point where I would keep getting hit in the head somehow and I was very paranoid about it.... I never thought I would be healthy again,” said Onat.

Soon, she found herself not living her life. She started to avoid her friends.

“I would just go and stay in my room all the time,” Onat said. “I would be scared of people just touching my head.”

But Onat would find her way back to the volleyball court. As a recruit to McMaster, she worked with a sports psychologist to recover.

“It took me two months to be able to get back to playing and not be scared. It wasn't an easy process. I would get hit in the head... and be terrified and have a breakdown, but then I would see that I was fine. But that happened several times before I trusted and fully understood that not everything would give me a concussion.”

“Ina is a fighter. She has had every reason to quit, every reason to give up, yet here she is,” said teammate Rebecca Steckle. “One concussion is not easy – but multiple within a few short months can easily look like the end of a sports career. But for Ina, that was just simply another hurdle over which she sailed with patience and acceptance.”

To many people a situation like Onat’s would be a dark time in life, but she saw it as one of the times she grew the most as a person.

“I honestly wouldn't take it back if I could relive my life because I learned a lot from it. It helped me grow,” she said.

It also helped give her an idea of what she wants to do with her life. Currently a social science student, she is looking to major in psychology, neuroscience and behaviour. Her goal is to become a sports psychologist to help other players in the position she was in just last year. But whether she wants to do it in Turkey or Canada is still to be determined.

“That's a very tough question that I haven't asked myself,” she said.

Her Future

Women's volleyball has a large following in Turkey, with a three-division women's league and a national team ranked 11th in the world (Canada sits 16th). Onat sees this as a possible way to continue her volleyball career after she graduates from McMaster.

“I definitely don't want to stop playing. I'm at a different level than I was before because of all the injuries, but it would definitely be a dream of mine to go back to the city I was playing in,” said Onat.

That city is her Turkish hometown of Marmaris, on the country's Turquoise Coast. A tourist town of about 30,000 she described it as “nothing like Hamilton at all. I was two blocks from the beach ... I never spent time watching TV. I was always outdoors.”

When Onat played her first game as a Marauder on Jan. 11, she had come a long way from gym class in Marmaris. She could at long last symbolically close the chapter of her life filled with frustration, frequent visits to the sports psychologist, and guarding her head from every potential impact. Since then, she has added two more games to her story as a McMaster athlete.

With the playoffs starting in the coming weeks it is unclear whether she will see any more game action this year. Not only is she still a rookie, but also the team is grooming her as an outside hitter after she played middle blocker in high school. But with two of the team's outside hitters in their fourth years of eligibility, Onat's time to begin a new chapter is coming sooner rather than later. Pretty good for a player whose career started with the words “Dad, I'm really bad at volleyball.”

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