This coverage was first sent as an email newsletter to our subscribers. Sign up to receive it, for free, on our Ottawa at the Canada Games page.
Newsletter by Keiran Gorsky, Tyler Reis-Sanford, Dan Plouffe & Farrah Philpot
SUPPORT LOCAL SPORTS JOURNALISM
Today is the final day of our Ottawa at the Canada Games coverage and what a ride it’s been! We hope you’ve enjoyed our daily Ottawa Sports Pages news throughout the 16 days of the St. John’s 2025 Games, and our pre-Games profiles series before that.
We’d like to steal a moment to tell you about the Ottawa Sports Pages Fund and encourage you to donate to this important source to enable local sports journalism if you are able.
The independent media business in Canada is not exactly lined with gold, and our not-for-profit organization is certainly fuelled by passion more than dollars. We of course do need funds to make the magic happen, and support from our readers is particularly crucial in this challenging landscape.
Our team has treasured the opportunity to follow these rising young athletes at this major milestone moment in their careers. You’ll find a total of 76 fresh Canada Summer Games medals in the hands of the 48 athletes from the nation’s capital who competed in St. John’s, and we had local athletes carry the Ontario flag at both the opening and closing ceremonies! What a performance.
If you reflect on where else you’ve been able to find news on these athletes’ amazing stories … then we think you’ll understand the importance of our publication’s work and our mission to shine a light on the local sports scene that mainstream media has long abandoned.
If you’re like us and believe these athletes’ efforts should be recognized and celebrated, we’d love to have you consider making a one-time donation or becoming a monthly donor.
~~~~~~~~~ Advertisement ~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~ Advertisement ~~~~~~~~~
Your contributions to support our work are eligible for charitable donation tax receipts from the Ottawa Community Foundation. Thank you so much for following our Ottawa at the Canada Games coverage and our local athletes! And now on to the fantastic final chapter of Ottawa at the Canada Games 2025:
Eva Génier & Jasmine Chrétien celebrate golden send-off before beginning university volleyball careers
There was an awkward silence after everyone was instructed to stand for the national anthem before the gold medal game in women’s volleyball at the 2025 Canada Summer Games. At long last, a noisy bass track that was most certainly not O Canada crept out from the speakers.
After a little laughter, the music screeched to a stop. There was another lengthy silence. On the final day of the St. John’s 2025 Canada Games, it seemed, for a moment, there would be no O Canada. Everyone seemed resigned to an eerie silence.
Finally, someone in the crowd started singing the national anthem. Before long, everyone in The Works Field House had joined them. It was a touching bookend to a competition that promised from the get-go to bring Canadians together in trying times.
“It was amazing,” Ottawa’s Eva Génier smiled as she remembered the moment in a post-game interview with the Ottawa Sports Pages’ Keiran Gorsky.
It preceded a hard-fought 25-14, 25-18, 27-29, 25-17 Ontario win over an Alberta team that had bested them in their preliminary round match. Over the weeklong tournament, the Albertans were the only ones who had stolen more than a set off the high-flying Ontarians.
Génier, an outside hitter, was on the floor for nearly the entire match. In a brief bout of rest, she and her Maverick Volleyball Club teammate Jasmine Chrétien got a surprise visit from the roaming Canada Games mascot, Gusty. The travelling codfish wasn’t wearing headgear, which gave both of them a bit of a scare.
“It was our first time ever seeing the mask off,” Chrétien explained.
“So it was good luck,” Génier added.
Back on the court, Génier scored a number of key kills at pivotal junctures in the match. Alberta’s liberos were often sent flailing in futile efforts to dig themselves out of danger. Perhaps the most entertaining stretch of the morning came in the third set, which Ontario trailed by as many as 10 points.
They managed to claw their way back after a series of tactical substitutions, eventually forcing match point at 27-26. It was a testament to their inner fight, Chrétien suggested, even as they ultimately needed a fourth set to get the job done.
Before games, Team Ontario’s coach has been inoculating the players with classic motivational videos, real and fictional – among them, Coach Brooks’ speech from Miracle and a good helping of Ted Lasso.
“Basically, we built this city to crumble,” Chrétien rattled off. “We were on such a high.”
“We had nothing to lose, down by 10,” Génier agreed. “We just played fun and free.”
Génier and Chrétien will both be departing their Maverick youth club as they enter new chapters in their lives. Génier will be heading to the Université de Montréal while Chrétien will be off to play for the Dinos at the University of Calgary.
“It’s sad leaving home and leaving this team,” Génier indicated. “This is the best team I’ve played with, even though it was only four weeks, but it was like my second family.”
“It’s definitely stressful, but it’s exciting,” Chrétien added.
Fiona Cortes-Browne, Danica Menard, coach Tracy Vaillancourt finish perfect soccer run
Arm-in-arm and gold medals dangling, Ontario’s women’s soccer team more than earned the right to belt out their own O Canada at the top of their lungs after they blanked Quebec 1-0 in the gold medal match. Even in defeat, the Québecois also took up the challenge and bellowed out their O Canada in French.
“We’ve been doing it since our first game so it’s just kind of tradition now,” highlighted Ottawa’s Fiona Cortes-Brown, who carried on her family’s own golden Canada Games tradition, following in the footsteps of her older sister Sofia’s victory at Niagara 2022.
She and fellow Ottawa South United Force product Danica Menard helped a sturdy Ontario side go the whole competition without conceding a goal. Cortes-Brown got the start on the backline, while Menard entered in added time to help preserve the lead, replacing Chiamaka Omeze, who scored the game’s only goal in the eighth minute.
Coaching the team was Ottawa’s Dr. Tracy Vaillancourt, who boasts a considerably unique profile as soccer managers go. A professor of psychology at the University of Ottawa, an expert in child development, and too, an author and popular science communicator, Vaillancourt inexplicably finds the time to coach Ontario’s under-17 women’s soccer team on the side.
As is common with athletes and coaches who dabble in the sciences, Vaillancourt’s two lives have a way of feeding into one another. Having dedicated much of her career to researching social dynamics and covert bullying in girls and women, she is, in a sense, the perfect leader for a group of young athletes. As an example, Vaillancourt references a study in which she examined the detrimental effects of extreme competitiveness in athletes, highly prone to social comparison.
“That comes straight from the pitch, right into the science lab,” Vaillancourt described.
On the field of play, she was immensely proud of how her team bought so readily into the system she and her staff proposed. The Ontarians were somewhat unlucky not to tally another goal or two in the final, being thwarted at different points by Quebec goalkeeper Juliette Portugais. A well-placed glove was the only thing to foil a near Olimpico goal from a corner kick in the 60th minute.
Cortes-Browne and Menard will now return to Toronto and the Canadian women’s team’s National Development Centre.
Sophia Audet, Sofia Milks win first Canada Games women’s baseball gold
The Ottawa So(f/ph)ias helped Team Ontario to the gold medal in women’s baseball, which made its first-ever appearance at the Canada Games.
Ontario built a 7-1 before Alberta battled back with four runs in the bottom of the fifth, but Ontario held on for the 8-5 win.
The local pair did not appear in the championship game, but played a bunch earlier in Ontario’s five-win, two-loss charge to the top of the podium. Sophia Audet and Sofia Milks, who played for the East Nepean Eagles and Ottawa West Twins in town respectively, will be eager to show their prizes to young local players.
“Really, the goal for me is to encourage younger girls to hopefully join the sport I love so much,” Audet, who volunteers with youth teams in Ottawa, signalled in conversation with Gorsky after her team’s semi-final win Saturday.
“Back home, there are younger girls who look up to me,” Milks highlighted in an earlier Team Ontario feature. “Work twice as hard as boys do and just never give up. Prove everyone who doubts you wrong.”
It was a third So(f/ph)ia who led the way in the gold medal game, as Simcoe’s Sophia Horton-Moulton went 3-for-4 and drove in three runs on the afternoon.
Madison Murphy wins second medal from second artistic swimming competition
Madison Murphy and Ontario’s artistic swimming team held fast in second place with an impressive showing in the acrobatic routine. Sticking with their Avatar theme, the eight performers gave a rather surreal performance in their new, green eye-bespeckled swimwear.
Murphy never got to be on top of the pyramid, hurtling down towards the water. The GO Capital swimmer played the role of something like a support pillar, often holding the maze of limbs together.
The team, she told Gorsky, had been practicing this very routine for close to two months. Combined with their technical routine, Ontario finished with a score of 660.9183 – good for a silver medal behind Quebec.
Murphy, 17, won a bronze medal earlier in the Canada Games in the women’s solo event.
Men’s softball gold for Conner Hopper, men’s volleyball bronze for Deng Yout
West Carleton Electric’s Conner Hopper and Team Ontario won their rubber match with Quebec as the provincial neighbours faced off for a third time in the Canada Games men’s softball tournament.
Quebec handed Ontario its only defeat of the competition in preliminary-round play, but Ontario prevailed in the 1 vs 2 playoff game to earn a direct berth in the final and then again in the championship match 4-2.
In men’s volleyball, Ottawa Fusion’s Deng Yout won a bronze medal with Team Ontario in a 3-0 victory over Quebec on Sunday afternoon.
Ontario won the first two sets by the minimum two points 30-28 and 25-23 and then completed the sweep with a 25-21 win in the third set.
Hopper and Yout did not appear in Sunday’s games. Fusion club head coach Matt Harris was the Ontario men’s volleyball team’s manager.
In mixed team diving, Ottawa’s Rafael Serey-Cormier finished just off the podium in fourth place with the Ontario ‘B’ entry, while Ella Lindsay of the Nepean-Ottawa Diving Club finished eighth with the Ontario ‘A’ team.
Will Batley selected as Ontario’s Closing Ceremonies flag bearer
Finally, at Mary Brown’s Centre, CANI Athletics sprinter Will Batley provided Ottawa its own ceremonial bookend to the Canada Games. Where Isabel Lowry of the Carleton Place Canoe Club bore the Ontario flag at opening ceremonies, it was the record-breaker Batley who hoisted it high on the way out.
Batley broke Olympian Sam Effah’s 12-year-old Canada Games record in the men’s 200 metres with his 20.57-second performance on Saturday. He added two more golds in the 4×100 m and 4×400 m relays for good measure, the latter alongside the Ottawa Lions’ Zach Jeggo.
It’s a doubly impressive feat, given that the 17-year-old was competing in an under-24 competition, and triply impressive, given the recent hamstring injury that forced the West Carleton Secondary School athlete out of competition for a whole two months.
“I wasn’t expecting it, I was in shock,” Batley said of his inclusion in Athletics Ontario’s Canada Games roster on Saturday. “So I knew when I came here, I was just gonna give my all.”
Alongside the three Ontario wins over Quebec in women’s volleyball, women’s soccer and men’s softball, Batley’s triple-gold medal performance played an equally instrumental part in Ontario tying Quebec with a total of 63 gold medals won at the 2025 Canada Summer Games, while Ontario edged their neighbours in the final medal count 175-173.
“All 514 members of Team Ontario can take pride in seeing Batley chosen to carry the flag into the Closing Ceremony — an honour that reflects not only his achievements, but the spirit of the entire delegation,” Team Ontario wrote in its flag bearer announcement.
“Just being able to have this experience, this young too, I was overjoyed to be announced to the team because I thought I wasn’t going to because of injuries early on this season,” Batley added. “So just to be on the team, it felt amazing. Especially with this squad, I was happy to be part of it and get to know everyone.”
That’s a wrap!
And with that, the Ottawa Sports Pages has officially concluded our 16-day run of daily coverage from the St. John’s 2025 Canada Summer Games.
We’ve counted 76 medals won by local athletes and many more memories beyond those. If you’d like to look back on any of those moments, you can find all our coverage via OttawaSportsPages.ca/Ottawa-at-the-Canada-Games.
Signing off from St. John’s is Keiran Gorsky, along with our team back home of Tyler Reis-Sanford, Farrah Philpot, Martin Cleary, Adam Beauchemin and Dan Plouffe – thank you again for following Ottawa at the Canada Games 2025!
