Blog

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…

Dr. Guy Faulkner is a professor of kinesiology at UBC who has long been fascinated by the link between physical activity and mental health. He is the founding editor of the academic journal Mental Health and Physical Activity, and often presents his findings to conferences worldwide. Recently he was a keynote speaker at our International…

Greg Henhawk is a Mohawk of the Bear Clan from Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation in Southern Ontario. He spent 32 years working as a secondary school teacher in Ontario before transitioning into his role as Manager of Indigenous Projects at Sport for Life. We sat down with Greg to talk about…

More and more Canadians are interested in basketball these days, which means there will be an increased demand for quality coaches in the years to come. With this in mind, Canada Basketball has spent the past two decades carefully developing a standardized coach education process based on Sport for Life’s Long-Term Development (LTD) principles, with…