From August 6th to the 21st (2022), elite athletes from one coast to the other gathered in the Niagara Peninsula, site of the 2022 Canada Summer Games.
And while no Sudbury athletes participated, to the best of my knowledge, (volleyball recruit Alexia Lemay-Evans was an alternate with Team Ontario), a trio of locals proudly represented the nickel city at the event.
In many ways, Neil Lind (tennis player/administrator/organizer) and Danièle Gervais (athletic therapist) are not all that different than the largely teenage congregation that remains the focal point of the Games. (joining Lind in volunteering for the tennis venue was his partner, Beth Goodmurphy)
Deeply devoted to their craft, whether as a volunteer or a professional, the Sudburians made the trek to St Catharines with very specific goals in mind, takeaways that they hope will open the door to further opportunities down the road.
Born in Montreal and moving between Toronto, Edmonton and Parry Sound in his youth, Lind got involved as a sports administrator largely over the course of the more than four decades he would spend in Sault Ste Marie.
“I guess it starts with my engagement with squash back in the eighties,” said the soon-to-be 69 year old current member and volunteer with the Sudbury Indoor Tennis Centre. “We hosted the Ontario Juniors there (in 1990 or so); I think that was my first run at anything on a provincial scale.”
“From there, I moved on to look after the squash leagues at the Sault YMCA.”
Around the same time, Lind would pick up the somewhat parallel sport of tennis, involved initially in and around the Lock City before expanding his reach via USTA events in Northern Michigan. Winters in Florida have only further blossom his knowledge of the organizational components of the potentially lifelong court pastime, a skill-set that he quickly put to use upon his arrival in Sudbury in 2012.
In fact, he would be among the tennis go-to folks when our northern mining town put together a bid for the very Summer Games which he just attended, a fact that heavily influenced his decision to absorb a certain amount of personal expenses to eventually serve as a supervisor at the Niagara on the Lake tennis venue earlier this month.
“For me, it was about trying to see if I could understand what happens at the Canada Summer Games and therefore complement what was a failed bid for us here in Sudbury,” said Lind. “I am hoping that my experience there will pay dividends for us to make another bid for Ontario Summer Games or something else down the road.”
Part of a large volunteer pool, along with Goodmurphy, Lind acknowledged that there were several other potential benefits and attractions to jumping aboard to donate two weeks of valuable summertime to a larger cause.
“I am very interested in seeing who the up and coming tennis stars are,” he noted a week or so prior to heading south. “And I would like to garner this experience to build the game locally and try and improve our delivery for tennis opportunities here.”
“I am hoping that some of the connections I am going to make may provide an opportunity for engagement with some of the executives involved with pulling this type of event together.”
His obvious love of tennis aside, Lind enjoys a keen awareness of the critical components that would prompt the likes of St Catharines and Niagara Falls, very well established tourism destinations in their own right, to open the doors to thousands (athletes, families and friends, organizers, officials) from right across the country.
“They’ve projected a half billion dollars in economic impact and all kinds of (sport) infrastructure enhancements,” said Lind. “You should see the structure they have built at Brock University.”
Though not bitter, Lind is nothing if not pragmatic looking back on the fact that he may not have needed to travel at all to attend the Games, had things gone differently a few years back. “I don’t think that Sudbury, at that time, had our act together to the degree that we needed to have our act together to success (with a bid) at that time.”
By contrast, Danièle Gervais is far more about personal growth and development, pulling no punches whatsoever in terms of the end goal. “The main reason I keep going is that I would really like to get to the Olympics one day, and this is the best way that I know how to do it,” said the 38 year-old multi-certified health care professional who now has four sets of Canada Games to her credit.
“Yes, it’s about marketing myself as a therapist, but it also gives me valuable experience working with elite athletes, and especially with larger amounts of them at once.”
A registered kinesiologist, registered massage therapist and certified athletic therapist, the owner of Optimum Health Centre in Sudbury is also in the process of acquiring the mandatory volunteer hours needed towards a fellowship in sports massage, a relatively exclusive field on a national level when you combine all of her various designations.
Given her druthers, Gervais would love to have been situated at the sporting venues, with direct involvement in acute injury treatment on site and a first hand view of the action. But for the sole purpose of getting her hours, it was Brock University that she would call home, booked completely from morning to night as part of the clinic staff on hand.
Week one of the Games featured plenty of wrestlers and swimmers on her list of appointments, with baseball and track and field taking center stage the following week. It’s clearly a clientele that bears little resemblance to the norm that she works with in Sudbury on a daily basis.
“Because most of these athletes have some form of athletic therapy back home, they know exactly what they need to compete,” said Gervais, who also worked the 2015 Pan-American Games in Toronto. “It’s interesting because at such a young age, they are very body aware.”
A twenty minute body “flush” often sufficed – “they have to feel good enough that they feel looser, but not so sore that they will be hurting while playing” – with the occasional acute injury mixed in for good measure.
“Normally, even when I am working with athletes (in Sudbury), competition is a week away, three weeks away, a month away. These guys are competing the next day, the next morning.”
Thankfully, there was yet another reminder about just how different her average patient would be for the two-week period that she called the Canada Summer Games home. “There’s not a lot of things that catch me off guard, especially now, since I’ve been doing this a long time,” she said.
“But while I was there, I was reminded that the body of an adolescent, of an athlete under 25 heals way faster that most adults – way, way faster. I can do way more with a little bit of time. They don't have the same degree of chronic pain.”
Like Lind, Gervais returned to Sudbury with a bountiful listing of the positives of her latest Games experience. “Every time I come back from a major event, there are things that I had stopped doing that I’ve now hit the refresh button,” she said. “Working with a highly multi-disciplinary group, you always learn something from the fellow staff.”
“It’s fun, it’s different, it keeps me fresh.”
