City to host tournament
2015 Canadian Open to be held in city
Ten years down the road, predicts Calgary’s Bruce Edwards, the members of Canada’s senior men’s and women’s national volleyball teams will have something in common.
They’ll all have participated in the 2015 Canadian Open Volleyball Championship, which, it was announced on Thursday, will be staged in Calgary over a six-day stretch that will attract a mind-boggling number of teams (somewhere in the range of 1,000), athletes (10,000, ranging from 14 to 18 years old) and coaches, officials and family members (12,000).
“There’s no chance that the national team 10 years later won’t have a player who didn’t play in this tournament,” said Edwards, a former nationalteamer himself after a brilliant career at the University of Calgary, who now coaches with the Canada West club here and serves on Volleyball Canada’s domestic competitions committee.
“There’s no way. All the players who want to play competitive volleyball are all going to these tournaments.”
In fact, the 2015 Canadian Open, which will be held in May at the BMO Centre and the Olympic Oval, will be only the second of its kind ever staged. Calgary hosted an early version of the Canadian Open back in 1998, and since then it’s been staged on a regional level, splitting the age groups between the various locations.
But earlier this year, Volleyball Canada took it to another level and combined all of the regional tournaments into one national event last May in Toronto, where 850 teams used 58 courts for the tournament.
“It’s grown to this massive tournament,” said Terry Gagnon, the executive director for Alberta Volleyball. “The growth in volleyball since 1998 has been incredible with the amount of teams playing. Every year you get more and more kids wanting to play, and it culminates in this huge event. You can imagine what it’s like for kids to walk into this amazing venue where it’s nothing but volleyball courts. It’s like the Olympics for them; it’s the biggest deal most of them will see in their lives.”
The Toronto event proved such a success that the bidding process for the second Canadian Open three years hence drew strong bids from Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary, with each city’s tourism people strongly on-side, no doubt looking at the 15,000 room nights that Toronto hotels were able to sell in addition to the accompanying spending at restaurants and tourist attractions. In the end, Calgary won out.
“I think it will be a great event that certainly is going to drive a lot of economic activity and it’s great for tourism,” said Marco De Iaco, Tourism Calgary’s vice-president of sales, sports and major events. “You’re looking at potentially 1,000 teams with family friends and officials. The vision from Volleyball Canada is to create the largest mass-participation volleyball event in Canadian history. And we really like the fact that it’s about the growth of the game.”
“Attracting this event to Calgary is a testament to our city’s strategic approach to event bidding, our history of hosting world-class events and our tremendous sporting culture and local champions,” added Doug Mitchell, chairman of the Calgary Sport Tourism Authority. “The benefits that accompany events like the 2015 Canadian Open are far reaching and include economic, tourism, and promotional opportunities, as well as inspiring our youth to live healthy, active lifestyles.”
In addition to coaches, athletes, officials and family members, the Canadian Open also will be a draw for scouts from the national team along with college teams on both sides of the border.
“Recruiting in Canada doesn’t really have the budget it does in other countries, just because of the distances they have to travel,” said Edwards. “This allows universities, colleges and national team coaches to go to one event and see a huge range of ages and talents.”