Cutting the Cord: How the Arctic Winter Games helped kill sports in NWT Communities

The headline has been used so often, it’s probably permanently on the sports desk’s cut-and-paste clipboard at NNSL.

Yellowknife Teams Clean Up at [insert NWT sporting event here].

For most today, it’s accepted as an inevitability: Yellowknife teams take home the vast majority of hardware at territory-wide sports competitions, to the point where a single community team managing a top-two finish at any of the NWT’s “big three” school team sports competitions (Spike It, Cager, and Super Soccer) is worthy of a headlining sports story in News North. In fact, it’s become so commonplace that any potential issue is glossed over, and each time, the result is discarded as an inevitability. Frequently, the same excuses pop up, the old tried-and-true standbys:

They have more kids, so they have a better chance to win.

All the good coaches are in Yellowknife.

These things, to a point, may be true (it’s impossible to argue about Yellowknife having a larger pool of players to choose from). However, these things have been true for decades, and yet, the discrepancy between Yellowknife athletes and those from the communities gets larger and larger each year.

So, with all this information in hand, the question is simple: if the old qualifiers haven’t changed, what has?

The answer is shockingly simple, yet easy to miss: The Arctic Winter Games.

Who would have thought?

If you’re not a reader from the North, the Arctic Winter Games is a bi-annual multisport competition, in the same vein as the Canada or Olympic Winter Games. The event hosts athletes from all 3 territories in Canada, plus Alberta, Alaska, Greenland, Russia, and Scandinavia in a variety of sports including hockey, volleyball, basketball, soccer, snowboarding, snowshoeing, and traditional Dene and Inuit games. Up until the early 1990s, the Arctic Winter Games hosted both junior and senior competitions simultaneously, until the senior games were dropped (most likely due to a lack of resources, but I don’t know that for sure).

In a roundabout way, this seems like it would in fact be a boost to junior sports across the NWT. Sport North, the Northwest Territories’ territorial sport body, has money freed up to spend on junior sports that it used to spend on senior activities, and the Games themselves, with a dearth of athletes, are able to offer junior competitions in more sports and age categories than before. On the surface, this change seems to be encouraging junior sport in Northern communities, giving more kids something to play for every two years.

However, no matter how much interest there is from the youth, there has to be somebody willing to run the program. And this is where the removal of senior sports from the AWG becomes a huge oversight.

Prior to the removal of senior sports from the Arctic Winter Games, teams from across the Northwest Territories would have a territorial tournament every two years to determine which community gets to send a senior team for each sport. Transportation and accommodation to the tournaments, usually hosted in Yellowknife based on available facilities, was provided or at least subsidized by Sport North, and so participation from a large amount of NWT communities was a regular occurrence. Teams from even the smallest communities would prepare for the chance to be crowned NWT champion (and get a free trip to Yellowknife, to boot) and represent the territory at the Arctic Winter Games.

When senior sports at the Games were removed, though, so were senior territorials. Without an event for the territorial champion to attend, there was no reason to crown one, and so the funded weekend tournaments became a thing of the past. On first glance, one may expect the removal of an event like this to have a small effect on interest and participation among senior athletes; after all, it’s just a weekend every two years. However, in the “what’s in it for me” culture present in many NWT communities, where “volunteers” need to be paid to cook hot dogs at a community barbecue, or require per diems to speak to a local panel about issues which affect them directly, it had a huge impact. Participation dwindled – in some cases, local sports leagues disappeared.

Where this affects young athletes, then, is through coaching and supervision – you can’t have youth sports programs without people willing to run them, and without a base of community members actively engaging in sports, willing and available coaches dried up in many communities. Today, it is very rare that more than a couple of high calibre athletes are present in a community at a time, unless a police officer or teacher (such as the fantastic Neil Barry of Tulita or Mike Botermans of Behchoko) moves to town who is passionate about sport and willing to teach and supervise youth. There is simply no opportunity for even willing young athletes to play and learn the game, any game, at a high level, and in team sports like basketball and volleyball, where positioning, learning to play a system, and proper form is crucial at the developing stages, it creates a hurdle that none but the most naturally gifted can leap. It’s no wonder that out of the last three junior men’s basketball teams to attend the Arctic Winter Games, 23 out of the 30 members of Team NWT were from Yellowknife, and out of the other seven, two were from Barry’s basketball program in Tulita (follow Neil Barry on Twitter!), one learned to play the game in Saskatchewan, and one was attending high school in Yellowknife.

And that, my friends, is why the Arctic Winter Games is responsible for the pool of high calibre teams and athletes from NWT communities (not Yellowknife, where the high population base means that coaches are plentiful) continuing to dry up.  To summarize (in handy flow chart form):

Remove Senior Territorials > Dwindling interest among adults > No coaches > Little opportunity for youth to play >Fewer top athletes

It’s worth noting here that it’s very unlikely the Arctic Winter Games committee which made the decision to cut senior sports from the Games was aware that it would have this effect on the NWT. However, whether expected or not, it is clear that this decision had an incredibly adverse reaction, one that continues to resonate in NWT sports today.

So, next time you read News North and see the old standard “Yellowknife teams clean up at ________”, put your fist in the sky and yell “DAMN YOU, AWG!” Shatner style. Because now you know – it’s not luck and it’s not population – it’s coaching. Or a lack of it, I guess.

KHAN!!!

Agree?  Disagree?  Have something to say about NWT sports?  Let me know in the comments section! 

Until next time,

Garrett

*Note: This piece represents the opinions of Garrett Hinchey, and the opinions only. I did not go into serious fact-checking detail on the stuff I wrote, and many things could certainly be wrong. So take it with a grain of salt.

 *Note 2: I am by no means insinuating that sport is dead in all communities – just that it’s heading that way in lots of them. There are most certainly exceptions to the rule.