Roots in Rose City
Bette Kalailieff developed life-long love of sports playing in Ross Public School gym
Once a Ross Raider, always a Ross Raider.
Welland native Bette Jean Hannel left her hometown in 1951 when she married Ed Kalailieff and moved to Port Colborne.
Since then she has become synonomous with grassroots sports in Port Colborne, as well as with championing softball at the provincial and national levels.
However, Kalailieff never forgot her Rose City roots nor where a life-long love of sports was incubator, in the gym at Ross Public School.
In the 1930s the elementary school on Niagara Street, a long, long home run south of Thorold Road, literally provided the only indoor game in town. It was the only school during Kalailieff’s formative years growing up on Church Street that had a gym.
“Ross School taught me the love of sports,” Kalailieff, a charter member of the Provincial Women’s Softball Association Hall of Fame, said on the eve of her induction into the Welland Sports Wall of Fame.
“That’s where I learned how to play.”
She began dribbling a basketball up and down the Ross court as a fifth grader, went on to play hoops at Welland and continued playing competitively well into her 40s.
“I was the top scorer when I was 44 in the Hamilton league,” Kalailieff said. “I was pretty proud of that, but I thought I better get out of this before I break a leg.”
Over the years she never needed an invitation to attend a reunion to return to her alma mater. When she played basketball in the Hamilton league, the Inco team from Port Colborne used the Ross gym as its home court.
“I got that for them, because I was very familiar with that court,” she said, punctuating the understatement with a laugh.
News of her selection to the Welland Sports Wall of Fame caught her by surprise, as enshrinement is regarded as a local honour first and foremost.
However, Kalailieff’s efforts on behalf of the sport expanded well beyond the city limits of the Port Colborne. She founded the Port Colborne Comettes in 1958 and until the team folded in 2002, hundreds of women from the region went in and out of the lineup.
Among the most notable Comette — “One of the girls said ‘Let’s make it feminine, that’s why we spelled it that way,” Kalailieff recalled — was Welland native and Olympian Pauline Maurice.
The Welland Sports Wall of Famer, Class of 2000, patrolled centre field for the Comettes for six seasons and, upon Kalailieff ’s recommendation, was scouted by Softball Canada on her way to making the national team that competed at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta.
In addition to forming the Comettes, she helped Shirley Demers, nee Tuft, launch the Welland Starlettes.
Kalailieff, Ontario commissioner for Softball Canada from 1977 to 1985 and, in 1985, the first woman elected vice-president of Softball Canada, didn’t pick up a bat until she was 27.
She was well into a second decade playing basketball, and well on the way to giving her knees a pounding she continues to feel today.
“I played basketball for 44 years, and I loved it,” she said with a chuckle. “That’s why I need a cane. I hurt my knee.”
Hoops is what interested her in spending time on a diamond in the first place. Kalailieff and her teammates on a women’s basketball team sponsored by Inco were looking for something to tap their competitive juices when hoops was out of season.
“The girls wanted to stay together and do something together in the summer,” she said, recalling how the Comettes were established.
In 1960 Kalailieff became the first woman to serve on the Port Colborne recreation committee, and in that capacity was instrumental two years later in forming a girls softball program in her adopted hometown.
For the Comettes, the investment in minor softball returned dividends over the years.
“Some of the kids came from the little teams I had,” said Kalailieff, who was inducted into the Softball Canada Hall of Fame in 1988 and received the prestigious Rolf and Jule Nise Award from the Sports Alliance of Canada in 2012.
Of all the honours she has received for a lifetime of promoting women’s sports and as a volunteer in the community, the tribute from the Sports Alliance of Canada is the one the great-grandmother of five treasures most.
The Playground to Podium Award recognizes her all-around involvement, behind the scenes as a builder and executive member as well as on the field as a player and as a coach.
Kalailieff, who turns 85 next Thursday, feels she has accomplished her three top goals — get more girls interested in softball, improve the level of competition, grow the sport — there is one thing she regrets.
“I just wish the Comettes had gone on.”
During her long playing career Kalailieff, the team’s playercoach until she was 45, didn’t get a free pass from teammates on the Comettes, who were all-business on the field.
Kalailieff remembered being on base for the Comettes when her daughter Dawn, a softball standout in her own right, hit a home run.
“I was rounding the bases, but I guess I wasn’t moving fast enough,” she recalled with a chuckle. “All of a sudden I hear ‘Mother, will you move it!’”
“I was going to take away her home run if I didn’t move it.”
Kalailieff, who spent 27 years working at Port Colborne Public Library after serving as editor of the then-Port Colborne News for nine years, was blessed with a team off the field as well. Ed, her husband of 65 years, helped her organize softball tournaments after running the family-owned Georges Bros. Clothing in Port Colborne.
She returned the favour by supporting Ed’s passion: singing and dancing with the Port Colborne Operatic Society. He was active with that organization from 1946 until 2011 and for 52 of those years Bette served as the operatic society’s business manager.
“I had an understanding husband. He had the arts and I had sports,” she said.
Ed Kalailieff, 85, also performed with the Robert Wood Singers, Harbour Lights, as well as with the Velvetones.
He and his wife have two children, three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.