By Tiffany Goodwein

High-profile coach pitches sports academy to district

Nov 29, 2019 | 9:20 AM

A new sports academy that would support students with their dream of making it to the Olympic podium may be coming to School District 22.

Coach Laura Medcalf who is on the longlist as a coach for the upcoming 2020 Summer Olympics stood before the board of education to pitch a new multi-sport academy.

“I have a vision of bringing together athletes from different endurance sports who are rising in their sport to provide them with opportunities that they are not getting through their local clubs,” she said.

As the head coach of the Vernon Tri-Masters, Medcalf said the desire to suggest the program came out of demand.

“We have athletes that are in Grades 10 and 11, they are taking a lot of courses at school and they just need more support to be able to do well in their academics and sport. They are training quite hard, they have really high goals, they are following a high performance pathway and this will help give them some of that support they are not getting,” she said.

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The Endurance/Multi-sport Academy is geared for students pursuing Olympic sports such as triathlon sports, speed skating, road and mountain cycling, track and field, and possibly swimming.

“A lot of those sports don’t have academies yet, and so they don’t have a critical mass to create an academy and so if we can bring them together we’ll have a critical mass,” she said.

Sports academies already exist in the district for hockey, soccer, golf, swimming and snow sports.

While the program has yet to be approved, four students have already expressed interest, and Medcalf said she could foresee another eight to 10 students enrolled in the program every year.

Students who are selected to partake in the academy would receive credit through V-learn, a flexible distributed learning academy that provides education online, on paper, or onsite.

The board of education will consider the academy at a later date.

by Tiffany Goodwein

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