In advance of the 2020 U SPORTS Men's Volleyball Championship, hosted by the University of Manitoba from March 13-15, 2020, we'll be shining the spotlight on alumni from the program, profiling their career and catching up on where they're at now.

The University of Manitoba Bisons will always hold a special place in men's volleyball alum Chris Voth's heart.

"I was a Bison since I was like 12. It was amazing to be a part of the program and it was my dream," the 2008-09 CIS (now U SPORTS) Rookie of the Year says.

Voth — a standout left side who was tenth in the conference in his debut season with 3.35 points per game — was a major cog in the machine for a young Manitoba roster, however a handful of key veterans also helped show the way.

Among them were inspirational captain Drew Venables — a fifth-year setter who overcame Stage II Hodgkin's Lymphoma, as well as fellow left side Stefan Bouw.

"It was amazing to play in my first year. A lot of people aren't able to experience that. We did have a huge group of young players, but the players we had playing were pretty old. Stef had a kid and was married and stuff, so he had life experience. Just to be able to play with those guys and not only learn volleyball but just life skills, you can't measure those things."

Voth was a team captain by his third year, a position he continued to hold for the next two seasons. During his UM career, he helped lead the Bisons to a national bronze medal while finishing with 1,032 kills and 1,219 career points — both of which ranked in the top ten all-time in the Canada West conference. Four years later, Voth made another step forward in his life — coming out as gay publicly in a Winnipeg Free Press story. By that time, he had been training full-time with Canada's national team and was the first active openly gay national team athlete.

The response he received at the time was overwhelming but also incredibly meaningful.

"When I first came out it was the most humbling experience of my life. It was crazy. I had thousands of people sending me emails online or through social media. It was insane.

It would be everything from people I know coming out of the woodworks, people coming out to me saying I can't tell anyone, people saying that they just came out to their families because I inspired them to and it changed their lives. I'm like, that's insane. Who would've thought that one person could do that?"

On the court, Voth continued to shine. He inked his first professional deal with Abiant Lycurgus in the Netherlands in 2014, helping the team win the Dutch championship and Dutch cup.

"I didn't know anyone on the team and it was my first time playing on a pro team, so I didn't have anything to look back on or fall back on. I just came out of the full-time centre, so I was really focused on utilizing the skills that I learned from that," he says.

"I had also just come out publicly before that and I didn't know how that was going to play a role. It was a lot of things happening but it ended up being awesome. The team was great and they're used to having first-year foreigners, so they were able to help me out a little bit with that."

Voth spent the following two years plying his trade in Finland and the Czech Republic, respectively. A particularly memorable moment came while playing in the former, where Voth and his teammates walked in the Arctic Pride parade, becoming the first professional volleyball team in the world to walk in a gay pride parade.

Injuries forced the charismatic athlete to cap his professional career last year. In fitting fashion, he chose to return to Abiant Lycurgus to wind things down.

"It's my favourite there. That's why I had to go there before retiring. I was there for two years and I had a really good base of friends and I knew the team and the coaches and the people that I coached out there. I really felt at home.

I could have seen myself playing there for another couple of years, but I just had some traumatic injuries. I shattered my pinky and tore my ab, so I was out for most of the season, and then I was having to grind my way back and it was really an uphill battle. By the end of the season I was getting to my level again and it was nice to be there, but I don't think I could've done another full season at 100 percent effort and I didn't want to go into it and only be able to give 90 percent."

Now in his first season as head coach of Red River College's men's volleyball team, Voth admits there is still work to be done when it comes to inclusion for gay athletes.

"I don't know how to make the sporting culture super inclusive and make it not even an issue. I don't pretend to know, but there's a lot of different paths that you can take. There's also debate on what is inclusion? There's going to be a lot of different views on that. I think that the more people you have that come out, then the more normalized it gets, and then that's how you kind of solve it, but there's also different viewpoints as well."

Nonetheless, Voth's professional knowledge and expertise continues to be a major asset in the volleyball community. He's run practices with the Bisons in the past and is currently on the board of directors for Volleyball Manitoba.

"I think now that I've come back, I really want to try and build up the level here in Manitoba even more. When we had both national teams here we were a real front-runner with all the competitions in every age category. It was all about Manitoba. Now national teams have spread out a bit and there's more funding going into different provinces, so it's tough because we don't have that huge population that other provinces have.

I'm just trying to see if there's little things we can change, like maybe modeling the European style. I've seen a lot of what they do around the world, so I'm able to give kind of a unique perspective on that."