A partnership between Football Canada and NFL Canada hopes to grow the women’s game. Over a period of 3 years, the agreement will focus on growing women’s football across Canada.
Because girls’ full-contact football is so new at Ontario high schools, the team has to travel to Toronto and Ottawa to find opponents.
Thompson is a Grade 12 student at St. Benedict Catholic Secondary School in Sudbury, Ont. and plays as a middle linebacker for the school’s girls’ tackle football team. She fears that her options will be limited when she graduates.
“I’m really hoping that they start up like a league for us to go and play because there’s nothing right now and I think that would be really fun,” she said.
“I would definitely join if there was something coming up.”
Thompson said she was unsure about playing football at first, but when a lot of her friends joined the team she gave it a shot. And she fell in love with the sport.
“I want to change, like, the way football is seen and inspire other girls that are younger than us to come up and do the same thing,” she said.
Two years ago St. Benedict was Sudbury’s first. It is the only high school in the city to start a girls’ tackle football team.
Milana Hickey, a Grade 10 student at St. Benedict and a running back with the team, says she feels the same way about the sport.
“I was scared and it changed my life,” she said about giving football a chance.
“It’s one of the sports that I focus on the most now and I couldn’t imagine myself not playing it.”
By the time she graduates from high school, Hickey could have more opportunities to play full-contact football than her older teammate.
“It’s well overdue,” said Kim Labrosse, St. Benedict’s head coach. He further stated that it is great to see large organizations like NFL Canada and Football Canada come together to support the women’s game.
Labrosse said investments will need to focus on high schools to foster players and coaches at the grassroots level for the sport to grow.
“This is where you get the most athletes,” he said.
Labrosse added it will be important to get more women involved in the game at the coaching level.
“Just because you’ve never played the sport doesn’t mean you’re not able to coach it,” he said.
“There’s coaching clinics out there that should be offered to a lot of women.”
It’s a priority for us as we continue to add more and more programming.
Football Canada executive director Shannon Donovan says bringing greater visibility to women’s football is a big priority for both organizations.
“It’s a priority for us as we continue to add more and more programming,” she said.
“It’s a big province as we know, so I think it’s sometimes a little bit harder to bring everybody together on the same page,” she said
On the East Coast, the Maritime Women’s Football League was established in 2004 and is Canada’s oldest full-contact women’s football league.
But Donovan said interest in women’s tackle football is growing across the country.
“I think that you’re going to see and hear more and more about women’s and girls’ football and the opportunities that are going to be popping up on a fairly regular basis,” she said.
“I expect that we will hopefully get close to having representation from all the provinces across the country at our women’s under 18.”
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