After two oh-so-long years of sports cancellations, postponements, stops and starts and all the uncertainty and anxiety that goes along with them, hopes are high that the 2022-23 season will be the first full and uninterrupted school season since 2018-19.
So it almost goes without saying that coaches and athletes are anticipating the start of the new school year like they never have before, with a fresh and seemingly boundless sense of enthusiasm.
For the uninitiated, the Sudbury high school fall sport season consists of cross-country running, golf, girls flag football, boys football, girls basketball and boys volleyball.
Golf consists of a single one-day championship, cross-country involves a series of preliminary races followed by a one-day championship race, while football, volleyball and basketball consist of interlocking schedules followed by a full slate of playoffs.
SDSSAA’s 18-member schools have until Monday at noon to confirm participation in fall sports, then team sport schedules begin as early as the following Monday (flag football) or Wednesday (girls basketball and boys volleyball).
The balance of next week will be devoted to pre-season coaches’ meetings, where rules will be reviewed and regular season schedules hammered out.
Boys football is always the outlier in the fall sport confirmation and scheduling process. The pre-season meeting is typically hosted on the last Monday in August, with the senior schedule the first team sport to kick off during the second week of school and juniors following the week after. True to form, this year’s SDSSAA six-team senior football schedule will open Sept. 15 at James Jerome Sports Complex, with Lively taking on Lasalle at 7 p.m.
SDSSAA manages two websites in support of its sports programming each season. The first, www.sdssaa.ca, is what one might consider a games centre, consisting primarily of scheduling information and results. Users can log on to this website and request automatic results updates from their favourite teams, whether it be by tweet, text or email.
The second site, sdssaa.rainbowschools.ca, includes just about everything else related to high school sports, including rules and regulations, past champions, a calendar of events, forms and so on.
For teams fortunate enough to advance to NOSSA or OFSAA competition, information on those events will be posted to their respective websites nossa.rainbowschools.ca and ofsaa.on.ca.
To those new to high school this year or those who couldn’t participate in past years for whatever reason, I would offer one small piece of advice: check out all the inter-school sports programming your school has to offer and make the most of these incredible opportunities to participate. It is a great way to make friends and learn important life lessons along the way.
It’s game time
Dave Makela is the athletic administrator for the Sudbury District Secondary Schools Athletic Association. His weekly column has returned for another high school sports season.
A pioneer in the flag football community, Travis helped co-found the Flag Football World Championship Tour, FlagSpin and USA Flag. Featuring 15+ years of content creation for the sport of flag football, creating and managing the largest flag football tournaments on the planet, coaching experience at the youth and adult level as well as an active player with National and World Championship level experience.
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