Tag Archive for: Community Story

The Little Club that Could – Minnedosa Skating Club Champions Inclusivity to Give Local Boy a New Way to Enjoy Skating

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On January 1, 2022, eight-year-old Cain Burgess of Minnedosa, Manitoba, and his family received news that no one ever wants to receive. A lump that his family had noticed on his shin was revealed to be osteosarcoma, and thus began Cain’s journey with cancer.

Cain spent eight months away from home undergoing chemotherapy and multiple surgeries to remove his tibia bone and replace it with a bone graft and a cadaver bone. When he finally returned home, Cain was cancer free and eager to return to his normal life.

Before his cancer diagnosis, Cain had been a very active kid, playing hockey, rugby, biking, and hiking and so getting active again was paramount for his recovery. Despite being cancer free, Cain was still unable to put any weight on his leg, so his family was unsure of what he’d be able to do. Luckily, the family’s good friend, Jacquie Gerrard – President of the Minnedosa Skating Club – had recently seen a CanSkate poster that showed a young boy using a sledge to get out on the ice.

“I really didn’t know anything about sledging, but I contacted Skate Manitoba, and they put me in touch with Skate Canada and they were able to provide me with more information. In Manitoba, it’s mostly Sledge Hockey Manitoba who do the most with sledges, and they’re managed by Manitoba Possible. They were able to get Cain fitted with a sledge, and he brought it out to Minnedosa and he was able to start in our CanSkate program using a sledge which was really cool,” said Gerrard.

Being out on the ice on his sledge has had a very positive impact on Cain says his mother, Danica Wotton: “The social aspect of getting him back on the ice has been beneficial in so many ways. He’s not excluded, and it’s a way for him to take part and be with his friends, and he’s having fun and he’s exercising, which is a huge thing, because I really can’t find many activities for him with his leg not working.”

Cain was also lucky enough to meet and skate with Paralympic athlete Tyler McGregor in February 2023 when he was in Winnipeg for his “Sledge Skate of Hope” campaign. McGregor, who also had a form of bone cancer and lost his leg, discovered para ice hockey early on and is now the captain of Canada’s national para ice hockey team and widely recognized as one of the best players in the world.

“He and Cain went for a skate on the river together, just the two of them. They got to talk and had a lot in common. Tyler has had his struggles as well, so they were chatting and sledging, and it was really cool for Cain,” said his mother Danica.

Minnedosa is a small, rural town, near Brandon, Manitoba, with few opportunities for kids with different abilities to get involved in sport and recreation. After seeing the impact that sledge skating has had on Cain, Gerrard is working to create better access to the sport for other local skaters. She applied for a grant with the Minnedosa and District Foundation to purchase two additional sleds for the club.

“We just got those before Christmas, and together with our recreation department, they’re now available anytime we have public skating, or sticks and pucks – our whole community can use them and try them out. Anyone who’s tried it thinks it’s super fun,” said Gerrard.

Cain has become the resident expert on sledge skating in his town. He helped make some videos for the club about how to use them, how to get in them, and how to stop and will be helping to teach other kids that want to learn how to sledge through the club’s CanSkate programs.

“We’re just so thankful to the club,” said Wotton. “At the time that this was all going on, Cain was really struggling with a lot and having a lot of challenges with his chemo, and his treatment, and not being mobile, and they were in the background, doing all of this and taking the lead on it, which took a lot off our plate. They gave Cain this opportunity – we didn’t ask for it – they just did it, and we’re really grateful to them for thinking of him and doing their work towards making this inclusive activity out here in in a rural area setting where we don’t have these things.”

If you’d like to find out more about sledge skating, and you live in Manitoba, visit any of the links in this story. For other parts of Canada, please get in touch with our Member Services desk at Skate Canada and they will direct you appropriately.

View Skate Canada’s CanSkate-Sledge Skating Development Library

You Don’t Have to Be Perfect; You Just Have to Be Awesome

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Photo by Elsa Garrison – International Skating Union/International Skating Union via Getty Images

In the spring of 2022, senior synchronized skating team Les Suprêmes struck gold at the ISU World Synchronized Skating Championships in front of a home crowd in Hamilton, Ontario. This marked the third time in history that a Canadian team would stand on the top step of the podium since the event’s inception 22 years ago. The previous team to win gold was NEXXICE in 2015, seven years prior. So, how did they get here?

Believe it or not, COVID-19 helped catapult the team to this level of excellence. When talking with Marilyn Langlois, one of the three members of the coaching team along with Pascal Denis and Amélie Brochu, she attributes their success to the training constraints they had to adhere to during the pandemic.

Marilyn paints a picture of what their training was like: “The pandemic forced us to focus more on individual skating skills and we had to get creative with our trainings, using sticks to maintain distance which allowed for more room to skate and to skate bigger.”

This unique training environment created a strong base for the skaters and allowed them to put together a much stronger program. Heading into Worlds in 2022, Les Suprêmes were not well ranked internationally, a direct result of limited opportunities to compete internationally due to the Omicron outbreak in January 2022. A few months later in Hamilton, the hometown crowd shook the building each time Canadian synchronized skating teams took the ice. It felt more like a hockey game than traditional figure skating. It was a special moment for this Canadian team as they skated lights out and captured the gold medal on home soil.

The 2022-2023 season was slightly different for the reigning world champions due to the fact that synchronized skating was added to the

Photo by Elsa Garrison – International Skating Union/International Skating Union via Getty Images

2023 Canadian Tire National Skating Championships program for the first time alongside all other skating disciplines.

This was a special moment for the synchronized skating community and fans welcomed the discipline with open arms. Throughout the event, spectators were heard saying things like “I didn’t know synchronized skating was like this” or “It’s come so far technically from when I last watched.”

However, this change also meant that synchronized skating teams would be competing for their national title a month earlier than in the past. Historically, synchronized skating teams participated in their own National Championships which took place in February, with the ultimate objective of peaking at the World Championships in late March. Going into nationals as World Champions the previous year, Les Suprêmes were the strong favourite to win, but ended up placing third.

According to Marilyn Langlois, it wasn’t a bad skate and they were not planning to peak at nationals. To not perform at your best at the National Championships seems counterintuitive, but sports are a building game and each competition prepares you for the next. The team was focused on getting the technical elements, good GOEs and building mental strength so they could peak when it counted.

Photo by Elsa Garrison – International Skating Union/International Skating Union via Getty Images

Following nationals, Canada’s synchronized skating teams began their international season and the work to qualify for the World Championships. This is a time of “believing and trusting the process and being confident in the program you are building,” shared Marilyn.

At their first international competition of the 2023 season, the team was just looking to improve and build confidence. These competitions are good preparation for Worlds as athletes compete against other international competitors. The focus is on winning one element at a time. The coaching philosophy always being, ‘You do not have to be perfect; you just have to be awesome.’

Indeed, they were awesome and in turn accomplished something amazing: the team won medals at both of their international competitions leading up to the World Championships, finishing first at the 2023 Challenger Series Spring Cup and claiming bronze at the 2023 Leon Lurje Trophy. This momentum carried them into the 2023 ISU World Synchronized Skating Championships, where they accomplished something incredibly awesome: back-to-back World Championship titles, a first for Canada.

Competing at this level of the sport requires strong mental skills, which is a main area of focus within the coaching team. They constantly tell their team that they just need to be awesome because perfection is impossible and regardless of the outcome of the season, “they are still going to be able to achieve something awesome by the end.” In addition to instilling this mindset within their team, they take proactive approaches to preserve athletes’ health. The coaching team regularly checks in individually with each athlete and Marilyn confirms that for their coaching team, “the health of the athlete, mentally, physically, comes before any performance.

For Les Suprêmes, winning in a healthy way is a mindset they would like to bring to the forefront of competitive sport. “Doing it in a healthy way is doable, it just takes a lot more communication and listening to the needs of your athletes, as well as, finding just the right balance between hard work and fun.”

How Figure Skating Saved My Life – Katharine Davies’ Story

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As a kid aged 8 or 9, Katharine Davies took a few skating lessons, but it was not an activity that stuck with her as she was drawn to dance, more specifically ballet.  A few months before the beginning of the pandemic, things started to shift for Katharine. She could feel her time as a ballet dancer coming to an end and found herself spending more and more time at the rink with her eldest daughter who had taken up figure skating.

In January 2020 Katharine thought it would be fun to take up figure skating as something she would be able to share with her daughter. She started slow, skating once a week, and was surprised at how hard it was. Ballet and figure skating often lend to one another, with many figure skaters taking dance classes to work on artistry, form, and other skills, but despite her background Katharine still found it quite challenging.

“I was getting frustrated,” she shared. “Everything felt harder on my left side.” Because of her ballet background, she chalked this up to having a good and bad side. “We all have an easier side and a harder side, but this gap was just so different.”

Winter passed, spring and summer came and went. All the while Katharine continued to find opportunities to skate despite the pandemic and found that she was beginning to make a fair amount of progress. The more progress, the more noticeable the gap became. What she could easily do on her right side was significantly harder on her left. Despite her on-ice challenges, there were no noticeable changes in her day-to-day life, so Katharine carried on.

In the fall of 2021, Katharine would discover that the gap she was experiencing on her left side was not limited to skating when she returned to a ballet class. Katharine shared: “Stuff that should have been super easy on either foot just wasn’t”. Following this discovery, Katharine immediately made an appointment with her doctor. Regular strength and conditioning tests revealed significantly decreased strength in her left leg. It could have been something neurological, or it could have been the nerves misfiring, but something was “off”. Katharine’s doctor sent her for numerous tests including an MRI.

The MRI revealed a brain tumor 5 centimeters in diameter (about the size of a small lemon), which is considered a large tumor. Things moved swiftly from that point. “20 minutes after my doctor entered my information into the database, he was contacted by a neurosurgeon. With a tumor this size everything is considered urgent.” Within two days, Katharine was sitting in the neurosurgeon’s office and found out she would have surgery as soon as an operating room was available.

On November 25, 2021, Katharine underwent a thirteen-hour brain surgery to have her tumor removed. Her surgeon was able to remove the entire tumor except for 2mm because the section the tumor was located in is a very sensitive area of the brain. Luckily, the surgery left Katharine with no permanent detriments; however, this was just the first step on her road to recovery and in January of 2022 Katharine would begin 27 rounds of radiation.

There was always a risk that Katharine might never skate again but four weeks later, determined and with the permission of her physiotherapist, she was back on the ice. “The first week I could not let go of the boards. The second week, I was able to let go of the boards to do stuff on my right foot. Week three, I was able to do everything next to the boards without holding on. Week four I was able to do backwards edges and by week five I was back to where I was prior to surgery.”

Katharine swears that figure skating saved her life. “If I hadn’t been skating, it could have been extremely, extremely severe. Not that it wasn’t, but it could have gotten to the point that it had done a lot more damage.” She continues to struggle with her left side on the ice but now thinks, “I have sort of reached close to a normal point of it just being a difference between the two.”

Katharine continues to skate and to live her regular day-to-day life. In November of 2022, she competed in her first competition in Adult Introduction Artistic and hopes to have developed enough to also compete an adult freestyle program next season. She has a goal of participating in the next ISU International Adult Figure Skating Competition in Canada. Katharine is a true fighter, determined and resilient. Her story reminds us that it is never too late to try something new, and that skating is for people of all ages and abilities.