Accessible Sport Council launches new website
Blake Sanders has played hockey all his life, but 10 minutes on a sledge was almost too much to handle.
“It’s exhausting,” said Sanders, an able-bodied athlete trying out the sport for the first time Thursday at Delaney Arena, a Thunder Bay Accessible Sport Council event centred around the launch of the organization’s new website.
“It’s really, really hard. I’ve been on for like 10 minutes, not even, and I’m already exhausted, and that’s just (messing) around.”
Sanders said it gives him a new appreciation for what physically challenged athletes go through to play sports and stay active.
“It shows a lot, what they actually have to do just to remain active in sports,” he said. “For an (able-bodied) person, hockey’s not hard. It’s easy to pick up, where this, I’ve got a really extensive background in hockey and I can’t do anything. It’s hard.
“I feel like a kindergartner learning to play hockey all over again.”
Formed about a year ago, the Thunder Bay Accessible Sport Council was created to bring together several smaller organizations under one umbrella to help promote sports like blind curling, goal ball, downhill skiing and wheelchair curling.
The power of many outweighs the power of the few, said TBASC chairwoman Tessa Soderberg, and the website is an extension of what they’ve already accomplished.
“Anybody can check it at anytime and we as members can update it and put up photos and do basically all the things you do with website,” Soderberg said.
“We’ve been working on that for a few months and getting it up to speed, making it accessible to screen readers as well as regular computers,” she said.
The need continues to grow, Soderberg added, less than a week after the conclusion of the Canadian Wheelchair Curling Championship at the Fort William Curling Club.
“There have been accessible sports in Thunder Bay for a significant amount of time. One of the difficulties, of course, is these tend to be minority groups. The council was basically formed in order to allow us to join together and work and host events like this to promote everybody’s sport, rather than each little group doing it by themselves.
“That way we can get the word out more effectively and do something like this website launch, whereas having each one of our sports have their own website just wouldn’t make any sense.”
The council, which works in conjunction with ParaSport Ontario, also has a Facebook page.
