Snap decision was 8 months in making
Welland’s sports organization of the year in 2019 won’t have to wait until next year to get award
Aphoto-op to recognize the winner of Welland’s top sports award for 2019 was anything but a snap decision.
Indeed, a presentation ceremony Thursday afternoon of the H.L. Cudney Memorial Award to Nappers Boxing Club was several months in the making.
Usually, a story and picture of the winner receiving the award runs in late winter, about a month before the Welland Sports Promotion Committee banquet, where an honour dating back to 1962 is officially presented.
This year’s awards night had been scheduled to take place Friday, April 3, but that and induction of the Welland Sports Wall of Fame’s incoming class were cancelled due to COVID-19.
An awards banquet for both 2019 and 2020 is tentatively set to take place in March or April. The winner of the Cudney Award for this year is expected to be recognized at that sports gala as well.
Instead of doubling up, and waiting more than a “whole year” to honour Nappers, the Cudney Award selection committee decided the family-run boxing club that celebrated its 101st anniversary in 2020 deserved the spotlight all too itself.
“Since we knew the winner, and they don’t know the winners (of the other awards), there was no sense waiting until next March or April. That would be a whole year,” Ron Lemon, chairman of the selection committee, said. “They might as well get the trophy now because we know the winner.
“By the new year, we’ll have the 2020 winner.”
Though there weren’t many sports this year after the need to contain the spread of the coronavirus in mid-march, the nine-person selection committee is confident that either an individual will be honoured for their contributions to sports in 2020
“We have two names already that fit the criteria.”
Nappers is the second organization to get the Cudney Award and the first since the Tribune Boys Basketball Tournament was honoured in 2014. Former Canada Basketball president and chief executive officer Michele O’keefe, now the associate director of athletics and recreation at Niagara College, received the award for 2018 after it was resurrected following a three-year hiatus.
While it suggests a trend of alternating between individuals and organizations, this is not the case. Lemon said the winner depends entirely on the nominations received during the past year.
His Cudney Award selection committee averages five to six nominations per year. Like the committees responsible for picking the sports awards for the city and the wall of fame, it would like to have more.
Lemon lamented that a dearth of nominations is a sign of the times.
“In this day and age, it’s tough to get nominations, and it’s tougher getting people to nominate,” he said. “People don’t want to nominate people. I don’t know why.”
This has resulted in selection committee members going out and doing a “lot of our groundwork.”
“The people on our committee are all sports-minded, they follow all the different sports. Sometimes, we have to think of our own names.”
Lemon said the award recognizes the important role Nappers has played in teaching people of all ages living together “without using boxing as a violent sport.”
“But one that shows it is a sport that brings self-defence into a positive value to learning to leave with each other without hurting each other,” said Lemon, a retired educator and winner of the Cudney Award as Welland’s sportsperson of the year in 2010.
“The club has helped numerous kids over the years find themselves and bring them back into a productive way of life that has positive goals.”
Napper, a one-time Canadian champion, succeeded his father Jeff as head coach and is named for his grandfather Ray Napper Sr. who ran the club for 18 years before he died of a heart attack in 1995 at age 63. He regards the description of Nappers as “more than a boxing club” as the ultimate compliment.
Napper said an overriding interest in what people can do with their lives outside of the ring, rather than what they can accomplish inside of it, dates back to the club’s founding in 1919.
“We spent so much time with these guys at practice. You get to know them really well,” he said. “You just want the best of these guys, especially when my grandfather had it.
“It was more about helping people who didn’t have it all that well.”
The award honours the memory of the late H.L. Cudney, the founder of the funeral home that still bears his name and a great contributor to sports at the grassroots level in Welland.