Overcoming odds
For residents of Flemingdon Park, reaching the Kraft Hockeyville finals and putting their community on the map is as good as winning
There’s a feeling amongst the people of Flemingdon Park that the outside world doesn’t pay them much attention.
With its leaking ceiling, cavernlike chilliness and lack of sporting basics such as a water fountain, the city-owned Angela James Arena on Grenoble Dr. is the physical manifestation of this feeling. Residents decry the sorry state of their rink and say the repairs they want go unaddressed by the city.
This explains the neighbourhood giddiness that met the recent announcement that their local arena cracked the top 10 of the Kraft Hockeyville contest. The annual corporate celebration of Canadian hockey rewards communities for their national-game enthusiasm; this year, after a round of online voting that begins Sunday, the top two entrants will each receive $100,000 to pump into their respective arenas and hockey programs, while the overall victor will also
“For many years, the community has been overlooked as a whole.” AISHAH SHERI FLEMINGDON PARK RESIDENT AND HOCKEY COACH
host a pre-season NHL game.
Aishah Sheri said she’s wept with joy “about 10 times” since Flemingdon Park was named a Hockeyville finalist.
“For many years the community has been overlooked as a whole,” said the hockey coach and league organizer who has lived there with her family for more than 20 years.
“It feels like we already won, because we put the community on the map.”
On the nonmetaphorical map of Toronto, Flemingdon Park is a stretch of wide roads and concrete towers stuffed between the east and west branches of the Don River, just north of the DVP. Though its name is often attached to phrases like “at-risk” and “priority neighbourhood,” Flemingdon Park’s crime rate in recent years has been on par with most of the city (the exception being thefts, which occurred at some of the highest rates in Toronto from 2004 to 2011, according to police stats).
The people who live there see it as a vibrant and diverse place. Less than a third of Flemingdon Park residents were born in Canada. Fourteen per cent of them immigrated here between 2006 and 2011. The neighbourhood has almost double the rate of low-income residents compared with the city average and a huge chunk of all housing in the neigh- bourhood — more than four out of five private dwellings, according to the 2011 census — consists of apartment towers higher than five storeys.
Rolled together, the concentration of a lower-income, immigrant-heavy population with little private outdoor space makes public venues such as the Angela James Arena vital to life in Flemingdon Park, said Muhammad Yunus, a 24-yearold hockey coach who grew up in the area and helped spearhead the neighbourhood’s Hockeyville bid.
According to Statistics Canada, the children of immigrants are less likely to participate in sports than the kids of people born in Canada — 32 per cent to 55 per cent as of 2005.
Yunus, a first-generation Canadian whose mother came from India, coaches kids aged 8 to 12 in the hockey league at the Angela James Arena, which is supported by sponsors such as Canadian Tire and the Toronto Police Service. The program started seven years ago and has grown to include almost 200 kids. Sheri, who helped start the league, proudly pointed out that half of them are girls.
“I see sport as a universal language, especially in an immigrant community,” said Yunus. Hockey, he said, provides a means for young kids to feel connected to the broader culture — yakking about the NHL has helped him in job interviews, he laughed — and the arena itself provides a place for youth to socialize and challenge themselves athletically. To be nominated for the Hockeyville challenge says a lot to young people in Flemingdon Park, even more so because of their unsuccessful pitch last year, he said
“Stories like this tell people,” Yunus said, “that no matter how I look or how I pray or how I dress, I can make a difference in this community.”
Nazerah Shaikh’s 11-year-old daughter, Selma, has played in the Flemingdon Park hockey league for the past two years.
“It’s amazing. To put on all that gear — she wears it proudly. It’s a badge of honour,” she said of her daughter’s love for hockey.
“For winter, what else are you going to do and where else can you do it? Not everybody has the luxury of going downtown and finding parking and all that.” Should the Hockeyville money end up in Flemingdon Park, Shaikh’s dream would be to transform the arena — which is small, decades-old, and has very little room for seating during hockey games — into a community complex, where locals can take fitness classes and sports can be played year-round. For now, the building is only open part of the year, usually from around Thanksgiving until April.
“The potential is there. The space is there, for sure. The demand is there,” Shaikh said. “We need that.”