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The historic Grand Slam victory of 19-year-old Canadian Bianca Andreescu over tennis heavyweight Serena Williams at the US Open in September will long be remembered, and could serve as a catalyst for future generations of Canadian athletes to excel not only in tennis, but in all sports. As both a female multisport athlete and the…

Sport for Life has named one of its keynote panels for the 2020 Sport for Life Canadian Summit, bringing together three of the leading voices in the physical literacy and quality sport movements to speak on the theme of Celebrating Success. Fabrice Vil of Pour 3 Points, Tanya Mruck of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment…

It can be tricky to source reliable volunteers, and even trickier to keep them involved in your organization. Whether you’re working in the sports world or elsewhere, Sport for Life’s new e-learning resource Recruitment and Retention of Volunteers contains tips for how to make the best of your volunteer situation. “We’ve long known that many…

Sport for Life has been hosting an International Physical Literacy Conference (IPLC) in Canada every two years since 2013, and now for the first time it’s going global. In September we hosted, along with Change the Game, the first ever IPLC Europe in Umeå, Sweden. “This has been one of our most ambitious undertakings, but…

Mark Verbeek has never been satisfied with the status quo. For the past two decades he’s been a physical education teacher in Ontario, and repeatedly he’s found himself struggling to convince parents of the importance of physical literacy. He’s been met with resistance from those who believe in tradition over innovation, and who don’t yet…

HeadStartPro Performance Training is a sports-education service provider dedicated to improving the health and longevity of athletes with accessible and affordable online courses. HeadStartPro’s multi-sport approach and universal concepts make performance and injury prevention training available to a broad spectrum of coaches and athletes in the Learn to Train, Train to Train, and Train to…

When Tim Adams first founded Free Footie, an inclusive after-school program designed to reach marginalized youth in Edmonton, he settled on a name that had a double meaning. “The intent behind the name Free Footie was primarily to communicate that the program is free, but I also wanted to free the game. The original name…

By Will Johnson Shortly after losing a job in November 2017, an event which led to an escalating series of manic episodes, I ended up in the psych ward of Vancouver General Hospital. They informed me that my antidepressant was partially to blame for my uncharacteristic behaviour, then gave me a prescription for lithium —…

The concept was simple: introduce kids to curling, rather than waiting for the kids to find it themselves. Ten years ago Rocks & Rings was introduced as a non-traditional curling setting that aimed to diversify the sport, making it reflective of Canada’s actual makeup. Now they’re on the cusp of signing up their two millionth…

When University of Manitoba researcher Simrit Deol first set out to investigate the barriers newcomer girls face when engaging with sport and physical literacy in Canada, there’s a particular phrase her subjects used to describe the status quo: “the same thing, the same machine”. Many of them faced both societal and personal barriers, and most…

Nathan Hall believes in the Physical Literacy Environmental Assessment tool, also known as PLEA. The associate professor at the University of Winnipeg has been researching physical literacy for years, and was one of the first users of the Sport for Life innovation. Now he’s using PLEA to compile data on movement environments in his home…

When you’re first teaching children how to play hockey, it doesn’t make sense to use the entire rink. The kids aren’t ready for it yet, and it’s simply too big. That’s why BC Hockey began incrementally adapting their program to follow Hockey Canada’s Long-Term Athlete Development model, based on the framework introduced by Sport for…