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Newsletter by Keiran Gorsky, Tyler Reis-Sanford, Adam Beauchemin, Martin Cleary, Dan Plouffe & Farrah Philpot
If hockey goaltenders have the reputation of being curious creatures behind barricades of padding and obscured expressions, box lacrosse goalies are altogether otherworldly. When the ball is stuck at the other end and you glance at them, impossibly still between the posts, you might begin to wonder whether you’re looking at some strange and burly inflatable.
Of course, it’s only temporary. When she’s not bracing herself to stop a shot or to spring from post to post, Ottawa’s Kyleigh Payne has a curious habit. Come intermission or stoppages in play, very suddenly, the inflatable animates. Cheerfully, she unstiffens and skips where she needs to be.
“It’s to calm down and get myself ready,” Payne explained in an interview with the Ottawa Sports Pages’ Keiran Gorsky. “Winning or losing, I’ll do it. It helps me feel better about myself and how I’m playing.”
There was every reason to jump for joy on Friday afternoon when Ontario’s women’s box lacrosse team dispatched Nova Scotia by a score of 12-0 in the bronze medal game. Payne stopped all 28 shots that floated her way as her teammates boxed their opponents out of threatening positions nearly all game long.
Though Ontario didn’t manage to top the podium for their second consecutive Games due to Thursday’s heartbreaking 4-3 semi-final defeat to Alberta, Payne took it upon herself, as she typically does, to be a comforting figure in and out of the box. She knew her team would be more than capable of racking up goals Friday so long as she played her part in net.
“I think it was a comfort for people because they knew I was behind them,” she highlighted.
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That semi-final wasn’t their only setback here in Newfoundland. While lacrosse was never postponed as with sailing and beach volleyball at the Canada Games, teams were still forced to head out of Paradise on the western edge of St. John’s due to the nearby wildfire in Paddy’s Pond – one of several the province is presently fighting.
Officials and volunteers had to rapidly set up shop on a concrete surface at DF Barnes Arena in St. John’s, where the ice pad underneath was plainly visible. Youth box lacrosse is often played on rink floors, but the Canada Games competition was contested on turf like the pros.
Ontario’s warm-up routine, Payne described, was thrown into flux. Their new, improvised schedule disrupted her usual bouts of wallball and stretches before games. Athletes only moved back to the Paradise Double Ice Complex Thursday evening, before fans were permitted back in attendance earlier Friday.
It made for a boisterous crowd in the afternoon, however lopsided the score. The Nova Scotians weren’t totally bereft of quality chances early on, when Payne was called upon to make a slew of reaction saves. Even in one-sided affairs, Payne loves the breakneck pace of box lacrosse.
She deemed it important enough to reiterate her dislike for a considerably slower sport on her Canada Games profile page – she singles out the lackadaisical minute-by-minute of soccer as her main motivation for getting into lacrosse seven years ago, when her parents told her that she had to pick a sport to play in the summer.
“I really hate soccer,” she repeated in a post-game interview. “It’s just so slow… I can’t watch it, I can’t look at it, it’s too much.”
Her trip to Newfoundland came immediately after her Nepean Knights U17 girls’ team topped the provincial ‘B’ championship at the recent Ontario Lacrosse Festival in Whitby. The Knights won all of their games as Payne conceded just five goals en route to the trophy. The triumph came as something of a surprise to her team, who hadn’t won any tournaments all season long.
“It was really exciting for all of us,” she underlined. “We’d never really won before.”
Payne’s sister helped her dye her hair bright red before that tournament, which, conveniently enough, matched both the feathery plume on the Nepean Knights’ helmet and the red of Team Ontario’s jerseys.
Payne and some of her teammates are going on a road trip Saturday before skipping back home with much of Team Ontario on Sunday.
Ottawa’s Mary James, who can consistently be found supporting just about every level of female lacrosse, was an assistant coach for Team Ontario.
“I just go where the game calls me,” James told the Ottawa Sports Pages’ Adam Beauchemin earlier this year when she and the world-medallist Haudenosaunee Nationals women were inducted into the North American Indigenous Sports Hall of Fame.
Ontario men advance to basketball gold medal game
The Ontario men’s basketball team survived a late surge from B.C. to top the westerners 83-71 in the semi-finals. Godson Okokoh recorded 14 points while Emmanuel Oko-Oboh added six points and five rebounds off the bench. They will take on Alberta in the gold medal game Saturday night.
Daniella Appoh tallied 14 points as her Quebec women’s basketball team won their consolation game 71-32 over New Brunswick. They will play Saskatchewan for fifth place.
Deniz Capraz narrowly missed the podium in the men’s 3,000-metre open water race Friday morning at Rotary Sunshine Park in what was the final swimming event at the Canada Games. He finished the distance race with a time of 38:43.87, four seconds behind Quebec’s Adrian Cheung, who took home the bronze.
Reinaldo Abraham scored in the 10th minute in the Ontario men’s soccer team’s final action at the Games, as they bested New Brunswick 5-3 in an action-packed fifth-place match.
Sailors Brodie Sorensen and Evania Lovshin finished two races before having to pause yet again due to an approaching storm. Sorensen was disqualified from his first race of the day, but finished the next one in second place. He remains second overall with 25 points after seven races, behind Sullivan Nakatsu of Nova Scotia. Lovshin, meanwhile, shed her own disqualification streak, soaring into third place by winning both her races on the day.
And Josh Adamson of the March Tennis Club kept his perfect personal record intact with a 6-2, 6-2 victory over B.C.’s Gary Jiang in the semi-final round of the mixed team event.
His win allowed Ontario to get into a deciding mixed doubles tiebreak following a 3-3 record over men’s doubles, women’s doubles and pairs of men’s and women’s singles matches.
The tiebreak went to a super tiebreak, as Ontario’s Benjamin Azar and Zoya Chulak prevailed 10-7 in the deciding set to advance to the gold medal match.
Day 8 Preview: Britannia sailors in podium positions heading into final racing day
Despite competing for different teams at the Canada Summer Games, Ontario’s Brodie Sorensen and Quebec’s Evania Lovshin have a lot in common, and sitting in medal position heading into the last day of sailing in St. John’s is just the start.
They both call Ottawa’s Britannia Yacht Club home, they both share a coach, and for both Sorensen and Lovshin, sailing is a family affair.
“My family is super big into sailing, my grandparents sailed, then they taught my dad how to sail, then my dad brought my mom into it,” explained Lovshin in a pre-Games interview with the Ottawa Sports Pages’ Tyler Reis-Sanford. “Ever since I was super small, I was always in a boat.”
Lovshin joined Britannia Yacht Club at just nine years old, but it took a few years before she actually started to enjoy racing. By the time she was sailing against high-level competition, she knew that she would have to focus on developing her skills, both physically and mentally, to be able to keep up with the best of the best.
“I think last year when I qualified for this (the Canada Games) was when I finally felt like I belonged. I still have a lot to learn, so it doesn’t feel like I’m on top of the hill yet,” said Lovshin, who described herself as “famously bad” at starts. “I’m learning how much that matters, because you can only play catch up so much.”
Although the Britannia Yacht Club is located on the Ontario side of the border in Ottawa, Lovshin is excited to represent Team Quebec at the 2025 Canada Summer Games.
“Living in Chelsea, some people call it ‘fake Quebec’, they see Gatineau as a part of Ottawa,” smiled Lovshin. “It’s still a really cool opportunity, I’m proud to be for Quebec.”
Like Lovshin, Sorensen first learned to sail from his grandparents as well. Unlike Lovshin, Sorensen was hooked from the moment he first set sail on his own.
“I started when I was seven, then I did camp at Britannia for two years following that,” recalled Sorensen. “I was super passionate, so I decided to hop into racing and give that a shot.”
Since that early start, Sorensen has amassed a long list of accomplishments on the water, having won the 2024 ILCA 6 Provincial Championship, competed in the 2023 ILCA 4 Youth World Championships in Greece, competing in Italy in 2022, and placing fourth at the 2024 Canadian Youth Championships. He’s racing in his favourite boat at the Canada Games, the ILCA 6.
To prepare himself for the physical and mental stress of a regatta, Sorensen spends three or more hours on the water at least five days a week, on top of squeezing in three or four gym sessions that are designed by a personal trainer and his sailing coach.
Weight training typically involves specialized exercises that mimic heavy wind on open water, and a high focus on the quads, core, and glutes – muscles Sorensen noted are key to maintaining control during the rigorous tests of a regatta.
“It’s stressful. There’s upwards of 60 boats on the startline,” highlighted Sorensen. “You’re going to be passing boats within a couple inches sometimes. It’s very tight racing.”
Part of what makes sailing such a physically demanding sport is “hiking”, a common technique in sailing where racers lean their bodies out over the side of the boat to counter-balance the force of the wind on the sails. Hiking is meant to keep the boat flatter, meaning more surface area is making contact with the water, which improves both speed and control. Hanging one’s entire body weight, often perpendicular to the boat itself, is far from easy however.
“I’ve done a lot of different sports – rugby, rock climbing, hockey. I’ve played them all,” said Sorensen and Lovshin’s sailing coach Nicholas Kim. “Nothing is more demanding than hiking the boat.”
The mental aspect of sailing is just as important, if not more important, than the physical demands, the Britannia trio agreed. It requires strategic thinking, so much so that they lovingly compared sailing to chess.
“You have to think a few moves ahead at all times, even while exerting energy and being focused on controlling your boat,” underlined Kim. “It’d be like playing a game of soccer where the field is constantly changing shape and the net is moving around. The variables are different every time.”
When all is said and done, Kim said that winning comes down to one simple thing.
“In the end, the person who wins the race is the one who makes the least amount of mistakes,” he noted.
After piling in three races on Thursday, organizers hope to squeeze in three more Saturday to finish up the anticipated 10-race schedule that was disrupted by wildfires near the Royal Newfoundland Yacht Club.
Tennis player Josh Adamson serving up a season to remember
Josh Adamson is one match away from completing another unbeaten run in national competition. After recently capturing Tennis Canada U16 national titles in both singles and doubles, Adamson has carried that momentum on to St. John’s, where he and Team Ontario will face Quebec in the final mixed team series of the Games with the gold medal on the line.
It’ll be the latest significant stage for the 15-year-old March Tennis Club player who’s had tennis permeated throughout his life.
Everywhere he looks, there are reminders of the court sport, whether it’s watching his parents at work, hitting balls with his older brother, collecting champion trophies or checking his schedule for practices, future tournaments and international travel.
It was only natural Adamson would be introduced to tennis as a young boy, since it’s an obsession for his Kanata family.
And he has made the most of his opportunity.
Not only is he the No. 1 boys’ U16 singles and doubles player in Canada, but also he helped Canada win the silver medal at the 2023 world junior U14 team championship, he’s ranked 209th on the International Tennis Federation list for all juniors 18 and under, and he’s aiming to qualify for Junior Grand Slam events in 2026.
There are many reasons for his early success and the first one can be found at home, where his family is all about tennis.
Jonathan, who is Josh’s father, is the tennis director and head pro at the March Tennis Club as well as founder of the Adamson Tennis Academy. He has been teaching for almost 30 years, after playing university tennis at Virginia Commonwealth, Radford (in Virginia) and Victoria.
Erin, who is Josh’s mother, is the club’s manager and head of the junior program. A human kinetics graduate from the University of Toronto, she has a vast knowledge of sports that can help her athletes.
Will, who is Josh’s older brother, was a quarterfinalist at the 2023 Canadian outdoor boys’ U16 championships. He also was a strong high school circuit player for Earl of March Secondary School before graduating in June. When Josh isn’t at the national training centre in Montreal, he’ll spend hours practising with Will.
“It’s a family sport. I don’t remember when I started playing, but I’ve always liked it. My brother plays and I’ve played with him. I like travelling and competing in a bunch of countries,” Josh Adamson told High Achievers columnist Martin Cleary.
Adamson has been to Europe eight times to play in 12 to 15 tournaments so far in his career.
Winning tournaments has been a significant feature in his 2025 season. In March, he captured two boys’ singles titles and was part of two boys’ doubles championships at a pair of ITF J60 competitions in Guatemala.
For three weeks this spring, he won 13 of his 15 singles matches at two boys’ U18 tournaments in Romania, where he was a champion and a finalist, and one U18 tournament in Germany, where he reached the final.
“I gained lots of experience going there and playing on clay against players I don’t know,” Adamson explained. “I hope to improve my ranking to play in Junior Grand Slams.”
His latest gold-medal moments were at last week’s Canadian boys’ junior U16 championships in Toronto. The top seed in both singles and doubles, Adamson lived up to his ranking and won both disciplines.
He turned back Andy Tchinda Kepche, the national boys’ U18 singles champion, in the semifinals 6-3, 6-0 and Callum Mackinnon 5-7, 6-2, 6-4 in the championship final.
“I was down double-break at 4-1 in the third set before I came back,” explained the determined Adamson. “I was putting more concentration and focus (into the end of the match). I stayed there mentally and was able to come back.
“I was kind of thinking it might slip. But I still had a chance and I kept competing.”
Ontario endured plenty of drama in its Friday semi-final at the Canada Games, but came out victorious in the deciding mixed doubles match to advance to Saturday afternoon’s final against Quebec.
“We hope to win the event,” Adamson indicated before the Games. “Our girls are super strong and the boys also are strong.”
Ottawa at the Canada Games Daily Newsletter
A huge team of 48 Ottawa athletes is competing at the St. John’s 2025 Canada Summer Games in Newfoundland. The Ottawa Sports Pages will be sending out a free daily email newsletter with recaps, previews and profiles throughout the Aug. 9-24 national youth multi-sport event.
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