The promising Victoria-based Canadian women’s field-hockey team has a strong chance of qualifying for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which would be the national side’s first Olympic appearance since 1992 in Barcelona.
But it has to pay its own way to get through the qualifying process. The squad has run up against a huge gap in logic in the Canadian sport funding system when it comes to national teams.
Funding is based on recent success. The question then becomes: How do you get that success if you aren’t funded at the crucial breakthrough phase?
The Canadian women’s field-hockey team will have to pay its own way to the first-stage Olympic qualifying tournament June 19-27 in Valencia, Spain. So it has launched a GoFundMe campaign to get there. They expect Island support to be robust. The sport is popular here and many of the players who represented Canada in its last Olympic appearance in 1992 were from Victoria and the Cowichan Valley.
“I feel this is a big issue in Canadian sport,” said Canadian national team captain Kate Wright.
“The national team finished the last international season with a record of 18 wins, 13 ties and three losses. The three losses were against top-ranked sides — No. 1 Netherlands, No. 3 Australia and No. 12 USA. We tied or beat teams such as New Zealand, Germany, Ireland, Spain, South Africa, Scotland, Belarus and France, all which are ranked ahead of us. We do not feel our ranking of No. 21 in the world is indicative of how we play and the results we have had. However, funding is usually dependent on your world ranking. It is a double edge sword because in order to increase our ranking we need funding to do so.
“We hope at some point Canadian sport will recognize these issues and work to amend them. It is difficult for national teams on the rise to continue to the top when only the teams at the top are receiving financial support.”
The Canadian women’s national ice-hockey team, for instance, is funded despite that its many Winter Olympics and world championship medals have been won in what is basically only a two-nation competition against the U.S.
The national women’s field-hockey team is adamant its dreams of Tokyo 2020 not fade away due to lack of funding.
“In essence, our team is performing extremely well, and we have a good shot at qualifying for the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics,” said Maddie Secco of Victoria, a player on the Canada’s national team, along with fellow Islanders Kathleen Leahy and Alexis De Armond.
“The unfortunate thing is we have run out of funding, and the costs of competition have fallen completely to the players,” added Secco.
“In 2017, all of our government funding was withdrawn. It means our program transitioned to a pay-to-play model, where the athletes are responsible for financing our training and competition. You can imagine how disappointing it is to see our dreams slipping away because of financial hardship. We have our sights set on winning the [Olympic first-stage qualifying] tournament in June, and with recent results to support this, we fully believe that our goal is achievable. But it will be impossible if we can’t afford to get there. The total cost of competing in this tournament will be around $75,000, with travel for the team costing $40,000 and food and accommodation costing another $35,000.”
The funding page can be accessed at makeachamp.com/canwolfpack.
The page opened March 1 and nearly $42,000, or 56 per cent of the goal of $75,000, has been raised as of Saturday with 57 days left in the campaign.
Secco said the response has been gratifying.
“Thank you to everyone who has already supported us,” she said.
“We are honoured to represent Canada.”
Of most value in this exercise, say the players, might be in pointing out a glaring inequity in the Canadian sport funding system for national teams.
