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RHIAN'S SOCCER JOURNALS: RIGHT TO PLAY 21st February 2008 On Sunday,17th February 2008 Amy Walsh and Karina LeBlanc organized a group of us from the National Women's Team squad to volunteer for the group “Right to Play.” This group uses specially designed sport and play programs to improve health, build life skills, and foster peace for children and communities affected by war, poverty and disease. Working in both humanitarian and development contexts, Right To Play has projects in 23 countries across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Right To Play is supported by an international team of Olympic, Para-Olympic and professional athletes, and we, the National Women's Soccer team members were among those volunteering. It makes a welcome change from administrative work on the CSA strategic plan, training and playing soccer.
The event got under way after the hockey game between Vancouver Giants and the Chilliwack Bruins. The event allowed people to skate with members of the Vancouver Giants, Canadian Olympians, National Sports team players and local celebrities! For us, it just meant basically showing up after the game and taking to the ice while hanging out with some youngsters out on the rink. One can hardly call this volunteering, as we had an amazing time ourselves.
We had erroneously been informed that we could rent some skates at the rink, but we were misinformed…. So, we were soon identified as women who had forgotten their equipment and so we had to sit on the sidelines and cheer everyone else on. As you can imagine, we only sat out for a bit. After about five minutes, we had taken enough sitting on the bench and we headed out on to the ice in our shoes. This was a little bit like playing the old video game Frogger. The kids who were out there can really move and they rarely look around them, so we worked on our sidesteps and swerves.
There were quite a few well known athletes from hockey and other sports at the event, and one was Ross Rebagliati. Let alone the kids - I was star struck. Ross won an Olympic gold medal 10 years ago in snowboarding. I was 15 back then, and that was the first Olympics I really took any interest in. Ross was definitely a hero of mine… in some ways anyway. I think it is still called the "Whistler defense."!!
All in all, it was a fun evening of volunteering; and I loved seeing so many of the younger National Team women helping out. It was great stuff.
RhianWilkinsonSoccer.com is the Official Website of Rhian Wilkinson.
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