Ontario Summer Indigenous Games back on track

Seventeen-year-old Gabriella Landry's volleyball team, Triple Trouble, has just won their first sets at the Ontario Summer Indigenous Games. She's pleased, but not over-the-moon with their play at OSIG 2022.

"Our skill and our effort was okay, considering that this is the very first time we have been able to compete together as a team," she said.

Landry's summary — we're good, but we could be so much better — speaks for untold numbers of young Indigenous athletes in Ontario nowadays. Almost every First Nation in the province can see that their young athletes, especially their team players, have gotten rusty during the years of forced isolation brought about by COVID-19.

Marc Laliberte, the President of Indigenous Sport & Wellness Ontario, calls OSIG a reset switch. The four-day gathering of youth athletes is a chance for hundreds of kids, their families, their coaches, and their communities to reap the benefits of sport and competition again.

WATCH l Indigenous kids compete at Ontario Summer Indigenous Games:

Which is why it's beyond heartwarming to see and hear them, back in the mix again, packing out the University of Ottawa gyms with volleyball and basketball games. Everyone is reveling in being back amid the old familiar sounds, the squeaking sneakers, the thumping chants of DEFENCE, the ref's whistles, the shouts and groans of teammates and parents and siblings on the sidelines. Everyone who has come here is loud and proud, excited and grateful, and at the same time, acutely aware of how many more young players are still sidelined, back home.

Generalizations have their limits, but a basic truth about Indigenous sports in this province is that the further north you go, the fewer competitive opportunities there are,