At a recent family gathering, my brother told my nephew that no matter what their eventual child is, they are getting a football for their first gift. This has long been a tradition, a way for my brother to cement his status as the ‘most influential person’ in the lives of his nieces and nephews – and, in this case, a grand niece or nephew – and he’s going to push them to be a fan of football at a minimum, a player of football ideally.
It’s lucky for him that this kid is going to be born in Yorkton.
It’s difficult to imagine a community better suited to raising a football fan in Canada. The Yorkton Minor Football program, for both young men and young women, is a solid one, and the coaching staff knows what they’re doing. You can see it in the game results, you can see it in the players themselves – the list of players that have gone on to play at a higher level, read out at the recent Friday Night Lights game, is a long one – and you can see it in the stands, where people are excited to see these kids play.
If this kid wants to play football, they are going have plenty of opportunity, not just to play, but to get extremely good.
In some ways, Yorkton might actually be a bit too good. They can get away with mistakes that other teams can’t, because they’re otherwise a pretty dominant squad. That could easily lead the team into bad habits that they have to break suddenly in a playoff situation. The sheer number of penalty flags that flew during Friday Night Lights can’t keep happening, because there will eventually be a team that capitalizes on those mistakes.
But that’s something the coaching staff knows, and hopefully they can get the message through to the kids.
On the other side of the coin, the team actually is good enough to be able to afford mistakes, and it’s not like there’s any reason why the teams they play against are out-matched based on pure numbers. The teams are from communities that are roughly the same size, in theory they should be able to compete.
The difference here is naturally going to be in the people who run the program, and they’re doing an amazing job building football players. You can’t get that good on your own, you need the right people to help.
Which, of course, bodes well for the football career of this kid who hasn’t even been born yet, and for my brother’s hopes of getting a football player in the family.
Then again, we haven’t met this kid yet, it could want to do something wildly different with their life than even the most insistent uncle could demand. But as it stands now, if this kid does want to make football a big part of their life, they’re being born in the right place.
