Cambridge duo Brush, Garside hit the hardwood
Playing for Canada at the U19 World Floorball Championships in Sweden
Starting Wednesday two local athletes will grab their sticks and help Team Canada go for the gold — but there won’t be a puck in sight.
Mytchell Brush and Tim Garside, lifelong friends from Cambridge, are currently with Canada’s team at the U19 World Floorball Championships in Vaxjo, Sweden.
To the average Canadian, floorball will look a lot like floor hockey. Games are played five-on-five with teams using sticks to try to put a white ball — basically a wiffle ball — into a net guarded by a goalie.
But ask anyone who plays it and they’ll tell you there’s much more nuance than that.
“The way I always explain it to people is that floorball is a mix between hockey and soccer,” explains Brush, 19, via email from Denmark where he and Garside have spent the past week at a training camp with Team Canada.
“It’s a very strategic game like soccer when played in higher levels. It is very much a possession game, which is what I love about it.”
Though still in its infancy in North America and Asia, floorball has long been a popular sport in Europe. For Brush and Garside, who are representing Canada for the first time in any sport, — not to mention having their first experience travelling overseas — seeing the European style of play, with its heavy soccer influence, has been eye-opening.
“Too much in Canada we play floorball like hockey,” says Brush. “Having time over here in Europe (where floorball was originated), has really helped me and my gamerealize how to slow the game down and how to skilfully make moves and passes.”
While floorball is certainly much more than hockey in a gym instead of on ice, in Canada, given the striking similarities, the game tends to attract former hockey players. Brush and Garside both played hockey from a young age and Brush was introduced to floorball eight years ago by his older brother, Tyler, who’s actually a coach with Canada’s U19 team.
Shortly after, Mytchell got Garside into the game.
“I was invited out to some dropin sessions and games and I just fell in love with the sport,” says Garside, 18. “It’s not a fast pace and overpowering sport. It’s an aggressive sport but nothing compared to contact hockey.”
Tyler Brush, also a former hockey player, got into floorball after his major-midget season of hockey and instantly forged a strong connection with the game. The elder Brush started playing pickup games and within a few years went on to play for Team Canada at the Floorball World Championships in 2012, ’14 and ’16.
Tyler has also started a grassroots floorball movement in Cambridge, forming a recreational league that’s still going today.
Mytchell Brush and Garside have been working toward making Canada’s U19 team for a few years now. Brush, a defenceman, and Garside, a forward, who both play for Cambridge FC in the Floorball League of Canada, took part in a tryout before Floorball Canada scouts watched league games and tournaments to determine the U19 roster.
And when the final team was announced about a month before the tournament, both Cambridge players were on it.
“I was ecstatic,” says Brush, who just finished his first year at the University of Waterloo. “The only thing was I decided to open the email when I was sitting in my morning lecture, so I couldn’t really be as excited as I wanted to.”
“It’s an honour to play for my country,” adds Garside, a University of Guelph student. “It was an amazing feeling.”
Now that their brief training camp in Denmark is wrapped up and the jet lag has (mostly) subsided, Brush and Garside are ready to get down to business. Canada opens the tournament Wednesday against Estonia before continuing their round robin against Norway and Japan. There aren’t exactly many opportunities for pre-scouting until the tournament actually starts and at the U19 level players cycle through pretty quickly, so the Canadian players aren’t too sure what to expect from the rest of the field at the 16-team tournament.
But Team Canada is counting on some tough games from the primarily European field.
“Sweden, Finland and Switzerland tend to be the main powerhouses,” says Brush. “Watching any level (men’s or women) of these teams play is a treat to watch because the skill and the vision of the players is insane.”