The North Bay Bulldogs Football Club continues to grow.
Not only is a new women’s flag football league starting this month, but Marc Mathon, Bulldogs President, says registrations in their Tyke & Bantam football programs are up quite a bit.
“We’ve grown from 130 kids to 178 kids in our youth football program this year,” he says. “That’s better than a 25% increase in a year. We’re trying to figure out why but maybe we’re just doing something right.”
Mathon does say football internationally has done more work and made more improvements than any other contact sport to make its game safer.
“The way we tackle and block has been completely revamped over the last ten years and it’s showing really showing some good results,” he says. “I think we’re seeing a real solid resurgence of interest in the game of football because of the efforts the sport itself has taken.”
Mathon says kids can now play football for five years before getting to high school.
“My understanding is that Chippewa is looking to put in a junior program and that’s largely the result of the Bulldogs’ work at developing players pre-high school,” he says. “And Canadore is going to be competing in the inter-collegiate level at flag football.”
Mathon says they modeled their flag football league after the college rules.
The Bulldogs’ new women’s flag football league begins play on Sept. 24.
There are four teams committed, but Mathon says there’s still time for more to get involved.
“We’re looking to see if we can get ourselves six teams in that league,” he says.” What’s really great about it is it doesn’t take a whole bunch of players to make a team. We’re going with a five-on-five format so if there’s still some groups of girls out there that want to come play some football, it only takes 8-12 players to make a team.”
Games will be played on Sunday afternoons at the Omischl Sports Complex.
To learn more or get involved visit northbaybulldogs.com.
