Andrea Mitrović

Andrea Mitrović, a young woman from Mississauga, is the best volleyball player in Canada in the under-19 category, and the most talented of all the female volleyball players who will continue their sports careers in universities across the United States and Canada. This is confirmed by the ranking published on the official website for university recruitment of male and female volleyball players, www.richkern.com.

At club-level matches in Ontario, Andrea has had no competition since last season, and now she is the most responsible for placing her team, Etobicoke 381, in the top five best teams in the first half of this year’s season.

“This kind of talent appears in Ontario every 20 years, but what sets Andrea apart from the others is her determination to succeed in sport, and her resolve to give her all towards that goal,” says her coach Zoran Manojlović, who has trained Andrea since she first started playing volleyball in 2010.

She played for the Ontario and Canadian teams in the summer of 2015. The following year, 2016, she received a call to play for the Canadian under-18 team, even though she was 16 years old. To the surprise of everyone in the Canadian volleyball scene, she declined the call: the reason was her trip to Serbia, where she and her coach joined in the preparations of the Serbian junior team for the European championship. She trained for a week with the best Serbian volleyball players her age and caught the eye of head coach Marijana Boričić.

“Coach Marijana told me that Andrea has to keep perfecting her volleyball technique and that she will seriously consider her for the summer of 2017, for the world juniors championship in Mexico,” says coach Manojlović.

This fall, Andrea will continue her career at the University of Buffalo, where she will be joined by Belgrader Marija Babić, and their future coach Claire Brown expects that the two of them will turn around the whole volleyball program, and that Andrea will become the best player in the whole conference.

Born in Winnipeg in 1999, the greatest dream of this young woman—who was named MVP in many Canadian tournaments and picked for the best first-string selections of Ontario—is to play in a Serbian jersey, and is impatiently awaiting the call of the juniors’ coach, Marijana Boričić.

“I was born in Canada, I grew up in Toronto and Mississauga, my family and friends are there, but as a volleyball player, I wish to be part of one of the best volleyball teams in the world and play one day for Team Serbia at the Olympics,” said Miga at the end of this short conversation with her and her coach.