Team Canada goalball women move from elementary school gym to Paralympic stage

By Dan Plouffe

There was jumping, hugging, smiling, cheering, screaming and sobbing.

The Canadian women’s goalball team had just beaten arch-rival USA in the championship game of the Santiago 2023 Parapan Am Games – which went down to the last throw of the match – to claim the Americas’ final Paris 2024 Paralympics qualifying position.

Whether you’ve followed the team’s journey from the start or just watched a goalball clip for the first time, whether you’re a diehard sports fan or an average Joe, you had to appreciate and feel the emotion that reverberated inside the overjoyed players.

“I think I can replay the memory completely, start to finish,” smiles Emma Reinke.

“I relive it all the time,” concurs Amy Burk.

“I watch the video – that eight minute clip of us qualifying that CBC put together,” signals Whitney Bogart.

The Canadian women’s goalball team’s Parapan Am Games gold medal triumph was voted as the most trending moment of the year for 2023 at the Canadian Sport Awards.

For Bogart, the victory was not only career-defining, it was also career-extending.

“I am retiring after Paris,” notes the 38-year-old who made her first appearance for Team Canada in 2005. “Chile would have been my last competition if we didn’t qualify.

“I wasn’t ready to be done eight months early.”

And so began the final stretch of hard work to prepare for Paris 2024, where Canada will be chasing its first Paralympic podium performance since the Athens 2004 Games – before any of the current players were on the team.

Half of Team Canada’s players are based in Ottawa, including the three starters who helped Canada clinch the clutch berth at Santiago 2023 – Bogart, Burk and Reinke.

On Thursday evenings and Saturday mornings, you can find them at decidedly less glamorous venues than when they perform under the bright lights of a Parapan Am or Paralympic Games.

Their home for practices most of the year is Carleton Heights or W.E. Gowling elementary schools. It’s one of those gyms with the stage right behind it, doubling as a site for school assemblies or lunches.

Before each practice, the players use painters’ tape to mark reference points on the floor so that they can orient themselves while wearing their eye covers (athletes have varied levels of vision, so blinders are worn to ensure everyone sees nothing). Afterwards, they peel up all the tape marks for the next gym users.

On site at practices, the players take turns coaching one another. Though they each have significant visual impairments and meet standards to be included in Paralympic competition, Reinke, Burk and Bogart all have some vision and can provide feedback to one another.

Team Canada coach Trent Farebrother, himself a two-time Paralympian in 1988 and 1992, gives the Ottawa trio practice plans and watches video from his home in Red Deer, AB.

In Ottawa, they don’t have a long goal that runs the length of the floor like they do in competitive matches. Pylons do the trick for goal posts, and benches on the other side work to help the throwers find their starting point.

“These have been our gyms for years now,” notes Bogart, explaining that it can be very challenging to find gym time period, and particularly at a site that meets their sport’s requirements.

The gym can’t be too small and it has to be hardwood instead of a tile surface because they spend so much time diving on the ground.

Some of Ottawa’s more distinguished gyms aren’t a great fit either. Goalball needs to be played in total silence so that the players can hear bells ringing inside the ball and know where to go to block it, which eliminates the possibility of sharing a double gym with another group on the other side.

The Nepean Sportsplex is a favourite gym because it has a rubberized floor like in international competition, but they still have to pay to rent the full space. And if they’re only using a section, others may venture in to play basketball on the other side and the practice can get interrupted when they’d have to ask others to leave.

“The moral of the story is once we find a gym, we stick to it,” Bogart concludes.

During the summer, the team’s regular home shifts to Jack Purcell Community Centre off Elgin St.

“They’ve been great for us. We’ve been practicing there for years. We can pretty much get any time that we want for the summer,” Bogart notes.

“Yeah, because they have no air conditioning,” Burk adds with a laugh. “They won’t rent it to anybody else, but they’re like, ‘We know that you guys know what you’re getting into.’”

Three days a week, the players also have strength and conditioning training at Movati Athletic in Nepean under Jacob Alexander, who coordinates with another trainer at Canadian Sport Institute Ontario in Toronto, Christine Camozzi.

They have another three days of cardio training either at home or at Movati, plus there’s mental performance training, physio and massage therapy, as well as mobility, yoga and stretching. It all adds up to about 20 hours per week, depending on their phase of training.

“It can get really busy,” highlights Bogart, who is a mother of two, like Burk.

Tough road to the top

The Canadian women’s goalball team very nearly missed out on their chance to play on their sport’s biggest stage in Paris. The Canadians had earned solid fourth-place finishes at the 2022 World Championships and the 2023 International Blind Sport Association World Games, but USA and Brazil were still ranked higher heading into the Parapan Am Games when only one of those global powers would get their ticket to Paris.

Goalball has become increasingly competitive globally in recent years, with the world’s top teams often trading placements depending on the event. But the International Paralympic Committee reduced the number of participating Paralympic teams to eight from 10 for the Paris Games.

In announcing the change, the IPC noted that all Paralympic team sports now feature eight teams, which ensures a standardized competition format across all of them, creates new opportunities for individual athletes in other sports, and reduces costs by having one less competition venue.

“I think it’s a disgrace what they’re doing,” states Burk, highlighting that a sign of the sport’s increased competitiveness came at the Pan American tournament she attended last year with 16 teams, up from three when she went to her first Americas competition two decades ago.

“You’re not showcasing the best in the world,” she adds. “There are teams that deserve to be there, but because of where they are positioned in the world, they can’t get a qualifying spot.

“Every team in Paris deserves to be there, 100%, but I do think we’re missing top countries.”

Team culture is Canada’s commanding force for Paris

Given how it played out, the Canadians wouldn’t change a thing in their path to Paris.

At the Parapan Am Games, Canada lost its first game to USA 5-3, which led them to a do-or-die semi-final match against Brazil following a pair of easy pool wins over Peru and Chile. Canada came out on top 4-2 over Brazil and then survived the dramatic final with a 4-3 nail-biting victory over USA.

The team says that the big performances came to fruition thanks to their efforts following previous defeats.

After struggling with COVID-related training restrictions, Canada went 1-3 at the Tokyo Paralympics and missed the playoff round. And while many viewed the 2022 and 2023 fourth-place finishes at world events as encouraging showings, the players felt otherwise.

They’d missed their first opportunity to qualify for the Paralympics at the 2022 worlds when they fell in the semi-final to Korea, who they’d beat 9-3 in the round robin portion of the event.

“We took it really hard,” recounts Reinke. “We knew that we could do better. We knew something had happened during that last game against Korea, and we weren’t happy with it.”

The loss forced an honest evaluation of the team’s shortcomings, and it ultimately put them on the path to improvement.

“If we won that game and we qualified, I don’t think we would necessarily be where we are right now. We still would have been putting in all the work and training and everything. But the drive would be different,” Bogart explains. “We’ve just kept building and building and building. Since worlds has probably some of the best work we’ve ever done. And it’s continued since then.”

The team now pays little attention to other teams at tournaments, focusing less on standings and matchups, and more on their own play. They’ve placed extra emphasis on their recovery sessions, warm-ups and mental performance. And the biggest development comes in teamwork.

“Since Tokyo, we learned to work a lot better together,” Reinke indicates. “We put so much work into our culture and each other.”

Burk notes that it was important for the team to create a “safe space” for thoughts and ideas to be shared openly.

“We sat down, we talked about our communication with each other, how we can’t just let things boil over, we need to be honest upfront. If it’s constructive criticism, it’s coming from a good place,” Burk outlines. “Where our team is now compared to where it was three years ago – it is night and day.

“We all have that one goal, and that one goal is to win and to be our best. We’ve all bought into that, and with that comes such good cohesion off the court as well as on the court.”

All the work on team chemistry made the moment of elation that much more special, when the team piled on top of one another as Parapan American champions and Paris Paralympic qualifiers.

“In Santiago, it all just came together,” Bogart highlights. “It was our breakthrough moment.”

About goalball

Goalball is one of only two Paralympic sports that doesn’t have a direct equivalent event in the Olympics (the other is boccia). It was designed specifically for players who are legally blind (the International Blind Sports Federation is the official governing body for the sport).

In goalball, players wear eye covers and compete in three-on-three matchups where they try to get a ball containing metal bells into their opponent’s goal with an underhand throw, bounce or roll from their half of the court.

Using hand-ear coordination, players use the sound of the bells to judge the position and movement of the ball, to then position themselves in the ball’s path to block their opponents’ shots.

Those who know the game best, however, say simply explaining it to the unacquainted doesn’t quite do it justice.

“You have to really see the game in person or on video to actually get an idea of how challenging it is,” Team Canada coach Trent Farebrother notes.

“Players are throwing the balls upwards of 60 kilometers an hour. It doesn’t give them much time to react. The speed of the game is impressive, and how people can orient themselves without their sense of sight.”

– with files from Jackson Starr & Madalyn Howitt

Read profiles on each of the Ottawa players via the links below:

Whitney Bogart EMBED LINKS

Amy Burk LINK

Emma Reinke LINK

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