Over the weekend more than 200 world-class competitors from nations like Italy, England, Hong Kong, Mexico, and the USA joined their Canadian counterparts at the MNP Centre for a truly international dodgeball tournament.

The inaugural World Youth Open saw under-18 competitors duck, dive, dodge, and more often than not deliver some serious dodgeball action.

It was also not your average playground affair, nor your average playground athlete.

“It is an opportunity to gather kids from across the world to play at a high level in a sport that they probably play for fun more than anything, and to just meet other kids and develop kind of like this global fellowship,” said Duane Wysynski, president of the World Dodgeball Federation.

He said the youth level tournament is new for the federation—which also provides the added benefit of giving younger players who are passionate about the sport an opportunity to experience high level competition before they start competing as adults.

“For the kids, this is a great introduction to it. Of course, there’s a lot of kids here who play soccer, play hockey, and they get the idea of training. But you know what we found here is kids will get into this, and our sport will sometimes attract athletes that maybe don’t want to play hockey, or they don’t play soccer, or want to play basketball,” Wysynski said.

“Those athletes can go home and they can reflect on this and think this is really cool, and their friends think it’s cool, and all of a sudden, it develops the sport.”

Calgary has been home to previous national tournaments for dodgeball, said Wysynski, including Western Canadian and National tournaments.

“Calgary is a very welcoming city for sports, and they’ve been particularly welcoming for dodgeball,” he said.

For local fans wanting more, Wysynski said that there are leagues in Calgary to join, with more information available through the province’s governing sport body Dodgeball Alberta.

“If you want to just see more of the game, you can check it out at the international level or at the national level. Our world dodgeball Federation YouTube channel is a great place to go. Dodgeball Canada YouTube is a great place to go if you want to check it out. We do a lot of live streaming on Twitch, which I think a lot of younger folks will definitely be familiar with,” he said.

Local friendly exhibition matchup becomes international affair

In between the bronze and gold matches on Feb. 22, athletes were joined by local VIPs in a friendly exhibition match to show off the sport and grow interest in competitive dodgeball.

That match, much like the tournament itself, began as an idea to host something between friends. With the World Youth Open, that was the idea of a friendly competition between Canadian and U.K. teams, and for the exhibition on Sunday, an idea between Mayor Jyoti Gondek and Tourism Calgary CEO Alisha Reynolds.

That grew to include members of the Calgary Wild FC and the Calgary Stampeders, who were then paired up with athletes from the attending nations in a red vs. blue matchup.

“It started as a joking comment between the mayor and I at the Women’s World Curling championship announcement, when we were talking about events that were on the docket, and she leaned over and said, ‘yeah, I’ll play dodgeball, and here we are today,'” said Reynolds.

“I felt the jitters. These kids are incredible. It was much harder than I thought it would be, and I will say the mayor has a heck of an arm. She’s a good dodge ball player.”

During the matchup, the mayor wasn’t hit once by any of the opposing team’s shots—causing her to laugh that if you can learn to dodge a political wrench, you can play dodgeball.

“It was hilarious to play dodgeball today. I gotta tell you, I haven’t done this since junior high. The closest I got to dodgeball was team handball about 30 years ago, so this was so much fun today,” said Mayor Gondek.

Not hard to get Calgary support to grow local sporting events

Getting the event together to support the World Youth Open and it’s players wasn’t hard, said Mayor Gondek.

“You’ve got to imagine, when you were this young, going to another country, going to another city, and representing your country in any sport, this is amazing. Kids are excited, the coaches are excited, families are here. This is a very big deal and I’m so glad we got to host it right here in Calgary,” she said.

Lydia Bedford, the head coach for the Calgary Wild FC said it was amazing to see young people come to Calgary to compete—not unlike what she did recently for the Wild.

It’s also important for the team to get in front of Calgarians.

“Today, we met staff from the Stampeders, a player from the Stampeders, [Alisha Reynolds] who’s in charge of tourism in Calgary, so that they’re all really important links for us as we start to grow the name of the club and get people to really understand what we’re doing and what we’re about,” Bedford said.

She said that when they considered to send for the event, they decided to send the coaches instead of the players just in case someone got hurt.

“I was a little bit unsure about sending the players, just in case. I didn’t know how dangerous it was going to be, so I said, ‘well, maybe actually we’ll send the coaching staff,’” Bedford said.

“Today’s our players day off. So doing an extra day on their feet probably wouldn’t have been ideal, but we volunteered our services instead, and I’m pleased we got to do it, because we had a lot of fun.”

Reynolds said building that reputation for Calgary as a sporting city was one of the reasons why the weekend of dodgeball was special in Calgary.

“Calgary has a focus right now on continuing to enhance our sports assets, our sports infrastructure, and the number of major sporting events we have as part of our business plan. Our goal is to be a year round, eventful city, and that means attracting major events, particularly sporting events,” she said.

“In the shoulder seasons, to have an event like this in February, bringing 200 participants, plus their families and coaches, it’s incredible.”

Photos from the World Youth Open