Yellowknife, NWT – World title-winning broomball players from the Northwest Territories believe their victories can help to fight the sport’s decline in Canada.
The NWT Rebels won women’s gold at the world championships of broomball in Japan last week, while Yellowknife Ravens lifted the men’s title.
“In broomball, I think you get better with age,” said NWT Rebels forward Terri-Lynn Locke-Setter.
“Not a lot of youth are coming into it, so the people who love to play are kind-of older.
“I would hope that it would grow, now. I think there’s a feeling that broomball is actually kind-of declining in Canada. This is something we can probably piggy-back off of, and try to help it grow. Hopefully we can fight that decline a little bit.”
Terri-Lynn and Tina Locke-Setter brought their world gold medals to Moose FM’s studios in Yellowknife on Monday, just hours after returning from Japan.
“We knew it was going to be a huge cultural experience,” said Tina Locke-Setter.
“The organizers had a bunch of different cultural events we could go to – a tea ceremony, Japanese bath-houses, calligraphy – and we had a day to drive up into the mountains and enjoy the scenery. It was awesome.
“It was really nice to know that everybody in Yellowknife was so supportive and excited to follow along with our progress at the tournament. You’d wake up and all of our Facebook walls would be plastered with notifications of people giving us congrats and wishing us all the best.
“Yellowknife has always been a big broomball community in general, going back to the late 1970s, and we have had some national and western Canadian success over the past 25 years. There have been some spectacular players who grew up playing broomball here and have represented the North.”
On the journey home, NWT Rebels players even got to share their success with members of the Canadian national women’s hockey team.
“We actually ended up in the Maple Leaf Lounge in Vancouver, with about half of the Canadian national women’s hockey team that just beat the US,” Tina Locke-Setter told Moose FM.
“There were some high-fives as we met each other going in and out of the bathroom, and things like that.”
Attention now turns to next year’s Pacific Rim tournament – a location for which has yet to be confirmed, though the NWT Rebels would love to bring a major event to Yellowknife in the future.
Their world title defence will take place a year later, in 2016, when the next world championships are held in Regina, Saskatchewan.
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