Canadian athletes deserve more recognition back home

With the Toronto Raptors winning, the 2019 NBA Championship has sparked a fire under Canada’s basketball nation. Before the Raptors’ past season success, British Columbia would produce an NBA MVP from Steve Nash. But who will be the next Steve Nash? 

Canada is generating more athletes overnight into professional sports. The time for Canadians to start dominating women and men’s professional talent is spread far and wide and not just basketball.

Bianca Andreescu from Mississauga ON. has a career-high ranking of #4 in the world, the highest-ranked Canadian in the history of the Women’s Tennis Association rankings, and she’s only 19 years old! 

Edmonton Alberta Native Chubba Hubbard just came off a fantastic year and had the NFL scouts on the future lookout for the season to come.

There are many more diamonds in the rough, but have we done anything to improve our nation’s impact on sports? 

I believe, as a country, we need to have younger age divisions in sports other than hockey and soccer (y’all are doing great!). As an athlete from Canada, it is assumed that you know how to play hockey, which in most cases is true because you can see that the country fully supports the sport of Hockey in Canada.

Well, 2020 is in for a significant time swing of things! Many trainers are popping up in the city of Edmonton, one, in particular, is Bounce Academy INC, now I do have a biased opinion about the brand new company as I am the founder, but Bounce Academy is dedicated to training all athletes no matter what age or gender. Bounce Academy does not but CAN specialized in specific sports, ie. Basketball, Football, Soccer. 

The main focus at Bounce Academy is educating our athletes on the power of their untapped potential. Speaking of untapped potential, there is also the Cream of the Crop Ranking Event. This is a Basketball ranking camp that combs the rural areas of Western Canada to find the players that get overlooked because of sports politics and other reasons that have nothing to do with the individual’s talent set.

I feel as a county that we need to either focus more on exposure to our athletes at a younger age or better scholarship opportunities for our athletes. With better scholarships, we can keep the majority of our athletes home, which would make training for national competitions a lot easier. 

Right now, if you are an athlete looking to play professionally, typically, you try to play in the states, even our hockey players! This is because there is more exposure to scouts; they have the professional leagues, and also they begin the process of building professional athletes at a way younger age than we start at.

Canadians should recognize their athletes abroad. It is just the reality that many of Canada’s most celebrated athletes won’t always be playing for teams based in the country. 

Until Canada becomes an athletics hub through a greater emphasis on physical ability, we should at least draw the attention to inspiring Canadian athletes no matter where they compete to build up the next generation of Canadian competitors.