The communities range from a couple of thousand of residents down to just a few hundred, meaning the participant pools from which to draw are quite shallow. Some high school sports teams require the participation of every eligible student just to field a team. On top of this, vast distances separate many of the rural communities, making it both time consuming and expensive to meet for competition.
Teams sometimes have to drive as much as six hours each way to play teams just within their division. Facing such demographic and geographic challenges, how can meaningful competition stand a chance?
Six-a-side football has been growing in popularity in southern Saskatchewan since the s. Where a typical a-side team requires roughly 50 players, six-a-side teams usually consist of anywhere from 12 to 24 players. Due to the relatively small population numbers of communities in the province — particularly in rural Aboriginal communities — this modification to the traditional format has made the game of football much more accessible.
This program soon expanded and delivered spring and summer camps to various northern communities until The Northern Lights School Division created the Northern Saskatchewan Football League in , which included teams from six of the seven high schools within the school division.
Three more schools joined the league the next year, and by — with the addition of La Ronge — the Northern Saskatchewan Football League had joined the Saskatchewan High School Association as its own team conference. When they introduced football to a region that had never had it before, Football Saskatchewan and the Northern Lights School Division recognized that making football accessible to the residents was a lot different than simply making it available.
He coaches the team in Creighton, one of the three expansion teams that joined in When he first established the league, Williment was aware that the coaching and education piece would be critical to making the sport accessible to the participants, so the new coaches held a weekend-long jamboree for all the interested players from the seven high schools prior to the season.
The kids go through a skills combine the first day, and then drills and exposure to the game on the second day. A lot of kids have already finished playing other sports and decide to play pick up football in high school and they have that physical skill set. Coaching and officiating clinics are offered in conjunction with the jamboree so that local coaches and officials can earn their certification and help to make the competition as meaningful as possible for the players.
Williment says this process was initially about engaging communities that had not previously played football. Once the introduction is out of the way, the process becomes about providing these kids with an opportunity to pursue meaningful competition. Introducing kids to a new sport has its challenges. But introducing an entire school district to a new sport is a serious organizational and financial commitment. The infrastructure has to be built, the equipment purchased, and all of the financial logistics around travel have to be figured out.
And when the participants, particularly in the early stages of Aboriginal Long-Term Participant Development, incur big costs for quality, developmentally appropriate competition, it actually hinders meaningful competition. And the need to increase activity levels among youth is certainly not something that is limited to the Aboriginal community, Lord added, pointing to a declining level of physical activity and physical fitness among all youth across the country.
That' not a barrier as such, but it's definitely a problem that exists. And with all the distractions we have through technologies, television and computers and video games and so on, kids find their recreational time being taken up by less active pursuits," Art Lord said.
While there are, of course, physical benefits of a more active lifestyle for children, as well as adults, getting a child involved in sports has other benefits as well, Lord explained. But emotional health can be improved through physical activity, and it's been proven in the past that kids that participate in sport and physical activity have higher self-esteem.
It provides kids with a positive interaction with their peers. And it also leads to maybe more family activity and family time.
So kind of the emotional health of children and youth can certainly benefit from participation. And also I think then there's an improved learning capacity.
The fact that there might be an improvement in academic performance with kids that are physically active," he said. It gets kids doing positive things and keeps them from the negative activities that they could delve into. I think that's another benefit too. Paul DeVillers, Secretary of State for Physical Activity and Sport, whose department is providing the federal portion of the Building Future Champions program, sees another valuable benefit that will come out of the initiative-creation of positive role models for Aboriginal youth.
To be able to have trained Aboriginal coaches and officials to work with Aboriginal youth, I think, is very important. So that's another strong component that one gets from participation in sport, is you develop those role models. Then it's very evident that they too can reach those levels. One of the goals of the Building Future Champions program is to help Aboriginal athletes, officials and coaches be prepared to take part in the Canada Summer Games. While the number of Aboriginal participants in mainstream provincial sports is increasing, the numbers still aren't where they could be, Lord explained.
Besides the over-all team title, winning teams were announced in each of the five sports contested. The Agency Chiefs Tribal Council were the only team to win a pair of events, badminton and broomball.
Representatives from all 13 of the competing tribal councils ended up taking home some hardware as they all ended up winning at least one medal at the Games. The Agency Chiefs ended up winning the most medals, This haul included 12 gold, seven silver and five bronze medals. STC was next in line with 23 medals.
The breakdown was eight gold, eight silver and seven bronze. Meadow Lake, which was third in the team standings, also finished third in the medal count.
It won 14 medals, consisting of five gold, three silver and six bronze. Saskatchewan First Nations Winter Games. Article Origin Saskatchewan Sage.
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