Ottawa players powering Canadian-champion Valkyrie Dodgeball to tournament crowns across the continent

By Keiran Gorsky

You must understand, Valkyrie Dodgeball are immensely serious about their sport. In tournament brackets filled to the brim with terrible puns and in-jokes you’ll never be clued into, they are the destroyers of everything whimsical. Like their Norse namesake enshrined on runestones, they are the choosers of the slain, and seldom will they choose their own.

“The court is our battlefield,” Ottawa’s Jessica Gray explains the origin of their name.

Valhalla’s an empty gymnasium in the clouds guarded by surly doorkeepers. If you’ve ventured too far through a competitive dodgeball tournament bracket in the last year or so, statistically, you’ve run into Valkyrie.

Last weekend, the club with seven regular Ottawa players continued their perfect season, winning the women’s bracket at the 2025 Mid-Season Clash at the Markham Pan Am Centre just north of Toronto, besting American club F.R.E.N.Z.Y. 6-4 in the finals.

It’s another addition to an overcrowded 2025 trophy case, featuring wins at some of the biggest club tournaments on the continent, including the Canadian Club Championship, Ontario’s Provincial Championship, Toronto’s Kick-Off Championship and “The Thing” tournament in Seattle.

Dodgeball stories can be stripped of substance and forced into feature-friendly chronology. But they shouldn’t be! It’s all chaos — chaos to the foamy core. We should unshackle ourselves from everything pertaining to time and descend instead into the colourful anecdotes dodgeball insistently lends itself to.

“We’re so used to being competitive all the time,” Gray says.

But how there’s no rule against immensely serious teams wearing Shrek ears and changing into Shrek-green jerseys before the playoffs. This one goes back to this year’s Canadian Club Championship in April. Claire Currie, a Torontonian member of the team, is one of the loudest voices in Canadian dodgeball. She will not stop screaming.

At that tournament in Calgary, she sported Shrek ears for no discernible reason. At random intervals, all towards the end of the knockout stages, she would bellow in baritone: ‘This is our swamp!’ She shouted and shouted until it reverberated through the MNP Community & Sport Centre, until they had forced their way through to the finals.

When they finally got there, Valkyrie found themselves down against defending champions Reckless by a score of 5 points to 2. Currie got the chant started:

“This is our swamp!”


It caught on like wildfire in the gym. All around them, the crowd joined in, until everyone agreed that this was their swamp. The room erupted as Valkyrie fought their way back into the game and inexplicably took a 7-6 lead.

On the final point, Shrek was confined to the bench – it was just the captain, Gray, and Ottawa’s Keitha Cowie left against four Reckless players. These shot clock-induced climaxes – these electric changes in fortune are what define competitive dodgeball. In the space of 30 seconds, with a slew of perfectly timed launches, the two of them had thrown everybody out.

It wasn’t something they could let slip into typically strange dodgeball lore. When last week’s Midseason Clash rolled around, Valkyrie decided to treat themselves to a little well-deserved silliness. And so, they traded in their classic maroon colour scheme for neon green cuffs and ogre’s ears. Look closely at the shoulders and you’ll notice Donkey’s little white waffles subtly snuck in.

It’s integral to have a sense of style in this community, filled disproportionately with digital artists. Everyone’s a walking piece of graphic design, and even if you lose, you’re losing in beautiful colours.

Valkyrie had suffered a rare loss the last time they wore black alternate shirts. And so, Cowie explains, they decided they would only change into Shrek jerseys come the playoffs of the Midseason Clash. Once they were out in the open, they were so popular that people on other teams wanted to buy them. Valkyrie currently have those shirts, among others, on sale at their online merch shop.

It was a lot of fun. But can dodgeball grow into a ‘serious’ sport in its current form? It’s something of a dilemma for Gray and Cowie, who genuinely do take dodgeball unflinchingly seriously and who have worked on the boring, administrative side of the sport at national and provincial levels.

Gray and Cowie both think dodgeball has a good chance of becoming an Olympic sport in the next 20 years or so.

“I joke that it’ll never happen in my playing career, which is unfortunate,” says Gray, who represented Canada at the 2024 Dodgeball World Championship.

If it does happen, it’s hard to imagine dodgeball can keep being the same unconstrained pocket of creative energy. But Gray doesn’t want to lose what makes dodgeball special.

“Dodgeball should never lose its heart and soul simply to get a place of honour or more notoriety,” Cowie underlines. “We are a unique sport full of unique people.”

In their media appearances through the years, the constant for Gray and Cowie has been change. Early on, interview questions were often along the lines of how competitive dodgeball is different from the game we played in gym class. Nowadays, it’s hard not to look at everything a little more strategically – to consider what will become of the sport they love.

There’s some parallel here about some cartoon ogre, looking out onto his swamp and seeing something he doesn’t recognize. But that would be a little much. You must understand, Valkyrie are immensely serious about their sport.