Wow, what a week! (Richard Way)

Wow! What a week! The 2012 Canadian Sport for Life Summit was held last week in Gatineau-Ottawa and it was a huge success!

First off thank you to all of our delegates, presenters, panelists, poster presenters and exhibitors for making this year’s Summit our best yet. With over 550 delegates attending over 40 different sessions and 4 Pre-Summit Workshops. I’d also like to thank Minister of State for Sport The Honourable Bal Gosal for attending and giving a plenary address.

We kicked the Summit off with our Big Ideas, seven presenters giving 4 minute TED.com style talks which were innovative and pushed the boundaries of our thinking, from announcing the new Actively Engaging Women and Girls in Sport document to discussing the business of sport the Big Ideas were a huge hit. We’ll be posting the PowerPoint slides and the videos of all the Big Ideas on the website in the next little while, and we will also have some blog posts from the Big Idea presenters going into more detail about their topic.

The Messenger Program was also launched at the Summit. The Messenger Program will provide tools to CS4L Champions, like yourselves, to go out into your communities and inspire new CS4L Champions. We’ve created four different presentations – a general CS4L presentation as well as ones for Physical Literacy, Team Sports and Individual Sports. We are going to make some adjustments to the presentations based on feedback from the Summit delegates and then we will post them on the website for you to use and share.

Finally on Friday we co-hosted the first ever World LTAD Symposium with the newly founded International Sport for Life Society. Delegates from 10 countries attended and we heard how countries such as Great Britain, India, Singapore and the US are implementing Sport for Life principles in their sport structure. Again thanks to all of our presenters, especially those who travelled to Canada to share their experience with us.

If you attended the Summit and/or Symposium, thanks again for joining us, I hope you had a great time. In the spirit of Kaizen, you will be receiving an email invitation to provide feedback about all aspects of the event, and we hope you take this opportunity to help us plan an even better event for next year.

As we continue to wrap things up, keep watching the website for new resources, videos and blog posts related to topics discussed at the Summit.

Richard Way
Richard Way is the Project Leader of the Canadian Sport for Life movement and a member of the Leadership Team. He has extensive leadership experience in the Canadian sport community including working with countless organizations on strategic planning and management functions, the Director of Sport for Vancouver’s successful 2010 Bid Corporation and twelve years with the Government of BC primarily in coaching education and training. A two-sport athlete, Richard represented Canada as a Luge athlete and coach as well as being an All-Canada-West soccer player with the University of Calgary. He now coaches his children at the community sport level.