Bonding in Sheffield will help us leave lasting London legacy

Being named as captain of the 12-man team to represent Great Britain at London 2012 was a very proud moment.

But if I’m honest, merely being at the Games is not even half of our goal.

I want the men’s and women’s teams that represent Great Britain to put in a performance that helps us build a legacy.

And to that end, we missed a training session of Friday to get unveiled to the media at our home at the English Institute of Sport, Sheffield.

It was a special day, but on the flip side I have shared five years with the guys that didn’t make it and I don’t need to tell you how much that means to those guys.

With our first game against Bulgaria less than a month away there’s no time for us to be distracted, there’s no time for our focus to be shifted away from our five pool games at the ExCel Arena in London (versus Bulgaria, Australia, Italy, Poland and Argentina).

That is all we’re trying to think about. However, as was proven last Friday, that’s not always going to be easy to do because we’ve never had team unveilings or media days before.

We get it with our professional clubs out in Europe, but generally in the UK we’re left to our own devices, which is really nice.

The closest we get to anything like it is on the tram in Sheffield, going from training to where we’re living.

You get people willing you on, asking how training was. We’re not hard to recognise with our Team GB tracksuits and bags.

But it means a lot that after a long, hard training session, someone is showing a genuine interest in what we are doing.

Our journey to the Olympics has been fraught with ups and downs.

As a team and as a federation we have remained strong in our belief, whether we’ve had money cut, or money given, no kit or no training facility, we’ve kept that to one side and focussed on putting a performance in at the Olympics and creating a legacy beyond that.

Our funding was cut two years ago but we were hit a lot softer than the women were.

I don’t know how they’ve managed it, it’s an absolute credit to them and the British Volleyball Federation, who have helped them put together a programme that’s the same level as ours when we’ve been funded and they haven’t.

We had to spread our funding thinly to the point where we lost our development team, which deprived us of the ability to have 12 more athletes training six hours a day for eight months a year with top level coaches.

That’s a wave of players we’ve lost when the hardest step in volleyball is getting into a European team, and that development team was what we needed in order to do that.

When we lost the development team we lost a generation of athletes that could have made the selection for now and for Rio in 2016.

When I talk about legacy it’s important that we put in a performance at London that we can take to the door of the BOA and say ‘look, we’ve done this for a legacy, we’ve got you this result, now let’s put a plan and a structure in place for the future, not just idly use the word legacy’.

The funding cut was a crippler for us, but sometimes you get thrown these balls and you’ve got to move with it and work with it.

We’ve had low points on the journey but it never got to the stage where we thought our Olympic dream wouldn’t be realised.

We’ve built a family here in Sheffield that manages itself through the hard times together.

We’re not a team to complain because, let’s be honest, we weren’t a team that was funded before.

And I’m not going to start complaining now. I’m still a funded athlete and I appreciate that. I get kit, I get looked after, I get chance to live my dream.

So it’s important that you find a balance and if we do get a result in London then we also have the right to take that in and say we’ve done what you asked.

Because I’m only 25. I want to be involved in Rio in four years’ time.

When I started playing volleyball at 14, my ambition was to be an Olympian.

I didn’t know how I would make that happen. At that time it would have been only on the beach that I could have done it.

Then we won the right to host the Games and suddenly there’s an indoor team.

There’s a lot of people who have put a lot of hard work in to ensure we can kick on beyond London as a British team.

It’s not that we necessarily want to abandon the home nations altogether, but performance-wise, joining forces is the way to go.

Our target at London 2012 has to be a quarter-final. Everyone is saying that that would be two wins from five games, but it’s not as easy as that.

When we had our test event, we won two games but we wouldn’t have qualified because of other results, which was a massive, massive blow. I remember the atmosphere in the locker room afterwards, it was as if we had lost out on a quarter-final spot in the Olympics. It means that much to everybody.

You don’t ever want to fail, so for me, something tangible is a quarter-final.

If I’m brutally honest, I’m not praying for a medal or a place in the final.

I’m just going to urge my team to give a performance worthy of the people that we’ve lost on the way, the families that have helped us on our individual and collective journey, and all the years of hard work.

That’s what sport is about.

I can’t guarantee a medal, I can’t guarantee a quarter-final, but as an athlete and a team we can guarantee a performance.

and another thing...

I’ve always been lanky so I suppose volleyball was a natural step for me but I only got into it because there was an open day at my school.

I fell in love with the sport immediately. It sounds cliched but that’s exactly what happened. It’s so intricate and so demanding. It’s always evolving and I’m never good enough.

You always want to be striving for something better.

I’ve played for the last two years in Holland but it’s been quite an array of countries I’ve played in: Sweden, Spain, Belgium.

It’s given me a wealth of knowledge working with a variety of coaches.

It would be quite nice in the near future to go back to Hull YPI where I learned the game, particularly with an Olympic medal around my neck.

I have less than fond memories of the concrete dusty floor and those kinds of things, but it’s been so long since I was there, and it played such an important role in my journey, that it has become a holy grail for me.

As a facility, the one we’re currently in now in Sheffield is phenomenal. We get so well looked after. As far as the UK is concerned, this is the best facility.

If we could get anything out of the Olympics, getting a facility of our own, would be a massive step forward.