Another Chance to Wear the Maple Leaf

By SAY Magazine

Nearly 30 years after her first Olympic appearance, Kerrie Buchberger found herself returning to the game in an unexpected way. After years of injuries and a total knee replacement, she discovered that volleyball still had something to offer her.

On her first day back on the court, Buchberger quickly realized the challenge ahead was greater than she anticipated. She knew volleyball well. After eight seasons with Canada’s national team, five years in Europe and an Olympic appearance, the sport felt natural to her. Sitting volleyball, however, brought entirely new challenges. She understood the game, but performing from the floor proved much more difficult. Her teammates moved quickly, sliding and turning across the court with a smoothness she struggled to match.

“It was so humbling,” she told SAY Magazine. “I knew in my head that if I could just get up, I could chase the ball down. But I’m down here, and I can’t move.” She laughed as she said it. Her words revealed a person who had learned to accept humility, embracing it as the real lesson.

The Athlete Before

Buchberger is Red River Métis, with family roots in Russell, Manitoba, Canada, and Langenburg, Saskatchewan, Canada, where she grew up, according to the Four-Town+ Journal’s report on her 2024 Hall of Fame induction. She started volleyball at 15, choosing a camp in Langenburg over figure skating. Her skills developed quickly.

What followed reads like a highlight reel. She won gold at the 1989 Canada Games with Team Saskatchewan. She was a two-time Great Plains Athletic Conference all-star at the University of Regina. She earned a bronze medal at the 1995 Pan American Games. In 1996, she became a member of the first Canadian women’s volleyball team to qualify for the Olympics, according to the University of Regina’s Sports Hall of Fame and the Journal. After five years of playing professionally in Europe, she was inducted into three separate Halls of Fame: University of Regina in 2001, Saskatchewan Volleyball in 2018, and the Manitoba Indigenous Sports Hall of Fame in 2024.

What came next is not in any of those bios. She worked at Pfizer for 24 years and raised two daughters. They grew up with volleyball in their lives by proximity rather than by design. Their dad first suggested volleyball, and Buchberger was hesitant. “I never wanted them to be defined by who I was,” she said. “They needed to have their own path.” So she stepped back intentionally and never coached them when they were young. They found the sport anyway. Her oldest is starting her fourth year at the University of Winnipeg. Her youngest is heading into her third year at Concordia University of Edmonton, where Buchberger is now head coach of the women’s team.

Through those years, she coached other people’s children and set high goals for them. She always believed, as she put it, that “you don’t fail, you learn at every opportunity you can.” Meanwhile, her own body was breaking down. Eight orthopedic surgeries over the years took their toll. Eventually, she needed a total knee replacement, which she was certain would end her athletic pursuits for good.

“I really thought that part of my life was done,” she said. “Even though in my heart it wasn’t. Physically, I thought I was done.”

The Door That Opened

Canada’s national sitting volleyball team trains in Edmonton, Alberta, where Buchberger lives. She had seen them in the gym and knew the head coach. As she prepared for her knee replacement, one question kept surfacing in her mind. I wonder if this qualifies me.

The assistant coach reached out when Buchberger was one month post-surgery. She was invited to join when she felt ready and to see how it went. Three months after her knee replacement, Buchberger sat down on the gym floor and played volleyball again. “I loved it,” she said. “Just to know that I could play again. I really thought that part of my life was done. To have that opportunity again, it’s just amazing.”

To an outsider, it might seem like a small moment. For her, though, it was the door opening once more onto a life she thought had closed for good.

Learning to Move

Sitting volleyball has been part of the Paralympic program since the 1980 Arnhem Games, and more than 10,000 athletes in over 55 countries now play it, according to Volleyball Canada. On this court, having two working legs can even be a disadvantage. “They kind of get in my way,” Buchberger said. The athletes without full leg function, she added, “are significantly faster than I am.” Her left knee, locked out in front of her, limits nearly everything.

She is still learning how to swing it behind her so she can push off with her right leg and hands instead. “We’re still experimenting,” she said. “This is still all new to me.”

She started practising with the team last summer. She took the fall and winter off to coach at Concordia and returned to the gym in March. Most of what she knows about the sport, she learned over just a few months. “I’ve had to be kind to myself and have a bit more grace with myself than I’ve had in the past,” she said. “The group of women on this team are pretty phenomenal. They were so welcoming.”

The comeback revealed something else along the way, something that had nothing to do with volleyball at all. Growing up, Buchberger said, nobody really knew what it meant to be Métis: “We were in that funny realm of, well, what are you?” At a coaching course in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, she found herself sitting beside a Blackfoot Elder and shared something she had carried quietly. “I said to him, sometimes I feel like I’m a little bit of an imposter,” she recalled. He asked her to describe her upbringing instead, so she told him about her grandparents: a fur trapper by trade, Cree-Ojibway, and a Métis grandmother, stew made from whatever he’d caught, and a fiddle that came out some evenings. He laughed and told her, “You grew up more Métis than most people who say they’re Métis.”

Years later, her own daughters encouraged her to look more closely at that heritage after taking an Indigenous studies course in school and both are now majoring in Indigenous Studies. She now serves as head coach of the Canadian Indigenous U20 Women’s Team, the Journal reported. She has also taken her oldest daughter twelve hours north to coach in a remote community. “If it’s a passion that you have and you want to go for it,” she said, “there’s a way to figure it out.”

Orlando

Her comeback in a Canadian uniform began in May at the inaugural USAV Sitting Cup, held May 22 to 24 in Orlando, Florida. This was her first competitive match for Team Canada since the 1990s. “I had my uniform on and they played the national anthem, and I had tears,” she said. “I was just like, oh my god, I can’t believe I’m here again. This is so awesome.”

Canada met the United States in the gold-medal match. The Americans won 3-2, with set scores of 28-30, 28-26, 25-22, 20-25, and 16-14, according to USA Volleyball. By Buchberger’s account, the match lasted two and a half hours. “It was weird because we lost, but we were also happy in the way we played,” she said. “It was everything that you wanted it to go. And to still find the joy in that, even though we lost, I know it sounds really weird.”

It doesn’t sound weird. In fact, it reflects the lessons she spent decades teaching to others, and now she finally had a chance to live them. “It’s not win or lose,” she said. “It’s what did you learn? Did you get better? Did you leave it all out there?”

What Comes Next

Buchberger recently returned from Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China, where Canada’s women’s sitting volleyball team finished fourth at the 2026 world championships. This event was the first qualifier for the Los Angeles 2028 Paralympic Games, according to the Canadian Paralympic Committee. Canada’s next opportunity will come at the 2027 Parapan Am Games in Lima, Peru, with a final qualifier in 2028.

“Really good and disappointing at the same time,” she said of the finish. “It’s kind of weird, how sport can be that way. We’re excited about getting back in the gym.”

At LA 2028, Buchberger is chasing a rare achievement: competing at both an Olympic and a Paralympic Games. In Atlanta, Georgia, USA, in 1996, she was one of many on a national team, carrying heavy expectations and not yet knowing how to find joy in the journey. The second time feels different. “It’s such a privilege,” she said. “The second time around, and I’ve gotten a second opportunity, I don’t really see it as pressure. It’s exciting more than it is pressure for me.”

She is not the same athlete who walked into Atlanta nearly thirty years ago. Back then, she was a different person, facing a different game in a different body, still unaware of the challenges she would overcome to return. Today, she is learning to move all over again. She watches younger athletes outpace her, and she lets their energy inspire her. Her body has been rebuilt more than once. Her heart, though, never needed fixing.