By Dan Plouffe
Sports Day the Girls’ Way delivered a karate-chop of courage to over 800 young girls on Monday at TD Place.
Organized by the OSEG Foundation alongside the City of Ottawa and Fast & Female to promote girls’ continued participation in sport, the third-annual edition of the event was its biggest yet.
“It was amazing,” reflected Kim McLean, the OSEG Foundation’s senior manager of community impact and engagement. “The hope is to get them participating today, but then going on beyond this one day and participating in their community and getting involved.”
The participants rotated through stations to try some sports that were familiar and others that might be brand new, including karate, soccer, track-and-field and ultimate Frisbee.
The day concluded with a panel hosted by CTV Morning Live’s Rosey Edeh, who was a three-time Olympic hurdler between 1988-1996, alongside fellow high-performance athletes Diana Matheson, Bianca Borgella, Tammy Cunnington and Hana Furumoto-Deshaies.
“We had amazing speakers,” McLean underlined. “It’s great to have these role models to inspire the girls and share their messages and goals that they’ve set, or challenges that they’ve overcome. It’s a great way to bring the community together and really help inspire these girls.”
The best-known of the speakers was Matheson. The Team Canada soccer legend and co-founder of the Northern Super League noted that “soccer player” wasn’t really a job for women when she was growing up, and she hadn’t really seen herself being involved in the sport long-term when she didn’t make youth provincial or national teams when others around her were.
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But she stuck with it, and after spending time with the former Ottawa Fury semi-pro team, Matheson wound up emerging as a star with the Canadian senior women’s team. The midfielder wound up participating in four FIFA World Cups and three Olympics, where she scored one of Canada’s most memorable goals of all-time to clinch a bronze medal at the London 2012 Games.
Now retired from her playing career, the 40-year-old is excited to bring an elite women’s soccer team back to Ottawa next season with Rapid FC.
Matheson – who said she was once very shy and didn’t like speaking to anyone she didn’t know, but eventually gained confidence through her involvement in sport – led the crowd in perhaps the first Ottawa women’s pro soccer group cheer at the end of the discussion, with one side of the stands chanting “Rapid!” and the other “FC!”
She misfired on one question from the audience, however, when a young girl asked her: “Messi or Ronaldo?” Matheson chose “Messi,” but the correct answer of course is “Sinclair.”
She later gave international soccer’s all-time leading scorer her due when asked who her favourite athlete was growing up.
“When we were little, it was just men playing sports on TV, but when I got older, it was Christine Sinclair,” Matheson signalled. “Even though she’s only a year older than me, she was already on the national team long before I was.”
Matheson encouraged the young girls to go after their dreams, while sharing a mantra she learned from Olympic rowing champion Marnie McBean: “If not you, then who? If not now, then when?”
“It comes down to hard work and your dream,” she highlighted. “Don’t be afraid. Anything you guys want to go after, don’t be afraid to go after it.”
Words of wisdom from female sports stars
Borgella, the 2023 world championships double-medallist from the Ottawa Lions Track and Field Club, also spoke on the panel. The 21-year-old shared her story of heartbreak from last month’s Paralympics in Paris – when she crashed to the track due to a hamstring tear in final – but also how she got back up to finish the race and has since found the resolve to push forward in her career.
Read More: Injured Paralympic sprinter Bianca Borgella emerging from post-Games blues
Cunnington was a wheelchair basketball player growing up but left that sport “for the reasons that many girls do – I was being bullied and not treated fairly by the team, and I decided that that was it,” she recounted.
But without sport, Cunnington didn’t feel like herself, and she eventually got into triathlon and then focused on swimming, ultimately reaching the Paralympics in 2016 and then again in 2021 when she was 45.
Cunnington said people with disabilities want to be treated like everyone else, and they also want to have the same opportunities in life as everyone else, while highlighting that there’s still a lot of work to do make the world more inclusive and accessible for wheelchair users.
Furumoto-Deshaies, who was a member of Canada’s Santiago 2023 Pan Am Games team in karate, started karate after being bullied when she was five years old. Though she never had problems with bullies since she joined the sport, Furumoto-Deshaies also wasn’t particularly passionate about karate, until she started competing.
She still felt uneasy about testing herself against more experienced athletes initially, but she eventually realized that their confidence came from their willingness to put themselves in challenging situations. Over time, she’s become comfortable with being uncomfortable.
When the floor was opened for questions from the audience, the majority centred on karate, perhaps signalling the girls’ interest in trying a sport that may not have been seen as appropriate for young ladies at one time.
“That’s kind of the whole message of what we’re doing here,” McLean indicated. “We want to show girls that they do belong in sport, that there is a space for them, and there’s potential for them to be involved as a career, or even just taking the skills that they’ve learned from these sports into their lives.”
Sports Day drew participants from 16 schools, with a priority placed on welcoming students from low-income neighbourhoods and many new Canadians.
“It’s just amazing seeing girls coming together, making new friends and seeing peers support each other,” McLean added. “A lot of the girls here today hadn’t tried karate before, but karate was a huge hit for them.
“It’s really cool to see girls trying new things, pushing themselves outside of their comfort zones, and just being courageous and feeling themselves belong in sport.”
This article is part of the Ottawa Sports Pages’ Inclusion in Sport series. Read more about local sport inclusion initiatives at: OttawaSportsPages.ca/Ottawa-Sports-Pages-Inclusion-In-Sport-Series/.