Sledge team hosting games this weekend

One day, Tara Chisholm hopes women’s sledge hockey will be in the Paralympics.

For now, the Medicine Hat coach and player is doing what she can.

Chisholm and the rest of the growing Hockey Hounds sledge roster will host the Edmonton PSA Dawgs in a pair of exhibition games, Saturday at 3:45 p.m. and Sunday at 10 a.m. at the Family Leisure Centre.

Chisholm, the coach of the Canadian women’s team and the founder of the local Hounds side, says the Hounds have 24 players at the moment, enough to field two split squads at Western Canadian Championships later this year.

And it seems the growth isn’t slowing down.

“Since January hit it’s been random, but we’ve had some families connect with us who have young children... they want to get involved in sledge hockey,” said Chisholm, whose fiancee and former national men’s player Derek Whitson coaches the Dawgs. “We’re excited about that.”

Men’s sledge hockey is now a Paralympics mainstay, and both Chisholm and Whitson were in South Korea last year to run a development camp with 14 countries represented. There’s no timetable for having a women’s event in future Paralympics, but Chisholm has talked with Hockey Canada’s general manager Tom Renney as recently as yesterday and is optimistic.

Certainly, with the rate the sport is growing in Medicine Hat alone, anything seems possible.