Written by: Jordyn Connell, SportWORKS Officer, Sport for Newcomers Charlottetown
Hello everyone!
We kicked off our SportWORKS – Sport for Newcomers Initiative program this week in PEI. We started off with a come try flag football two-hour session on Monday April 17th in the evening for newcomer girls from grades 4-12. We also opened the registration up to girls in the same age range who aren’t newcomers as well to have an all-around inclusive environment. We held the event in Summerside at our new indoor Dome sport complex and asked Summerside Spartans, the Summerside Football organization, to help us run this program.
The sessions were run by two coaches from the Spartans organization as well as a few grade nine students from Summerside Intermediate School to help run the drills. During this two-hour session the coaches were able to cover a large variety of skills used in the game. They started off with some offensive drills, doing hand off and running plays as well as throwing and catching plays. They taught them a few different routes to run along with the positions on the offensive line and made sure to touch on all the basics of the offensive aspect of the game. They continued the following portion covering defensive skills and positions. They ran a few flagging drills along with a flagging game. Then, after a quick snack break, to wrap up our session the girls got to play a game to apply the new skills they learned as well as experience a game-like scenario.
Before the girls left we had them fill out a survey to tell us how they liked our event. We had felt as though the first event went really well, we had a girl come in with headphones in and when asked if she was excited replied “no”, but half way through the event she had a whole new demeanor and left saying she had a lot of fun. The general consensus we gathered was that the girls had fun and really enjoyed our come try flag football day. We hope our session leads most of them to go try out for their school or local teams.
