Cover of "Before the Field Goes Dark: The Future of Canadian High School Football" | Author: Terry Edwards
At one point throughout Canada, high schools had football teams from coast-to-coast-to-coast. Now, in some areas, football is just a memory of a sport once played.
Terry Edwards, an author who began his career teaching in Ottawa, but spent most of his time instructing at Renfrew Collegiate Institute remembers a time when football was at every school.
Now retired, Edwards found that people didn’t even notice the sport had begun to dwindle in certain areas of Canada, including right in Renfrew.
Edwards saw this and begun to notice during his travels, schools with football posts, rusting away and upon speaking with administrators, that the football program had closed. This led him to think about the different struggles some sport programs have throughout Canada, that others might not even think about.
Even though small communities can struggle with funding for their sports programs, the size of the community doesn’t always correlate with their sport program. Edwards says some rural communities football is thriving and in some urban communities, it’s disappeared.
Are there solutions to bringing it back? What are the struggles about keeping the football program alive in these communities? These are questions Edwards hopes to find the answers to.
Before the Field Goes Dark: The Future of Canadian High School Football is available for purchase on Amazon in paperback only at this time. An e-book and audiobook are in the works.
To find out more on Terry Edwards, visit his social media page.
(Written by: Bob Kubbinga)
