Canadian Blind Sports Receives NextGen Program Support

It is with great enthusiasm that Canadian Blind Sports announces that we have received funding from the Canadian Paralympic Committee (CPC) and Canadian Heritage – Sport Canada, based on a recommendation made by Own The Podium for a Next Generation project in the 2017-2018 season. We thank the Government of Canada and the CPC for their support of our NextGen Program.

The goal of the NextGen Program is to maintain an NSO (Canadian Blind Sports) led, systematic, evidence based High Performance Development Program, which identifies and develops athletes to sustainable and repeatable podium performances at World Championships and Paralympic Games in 2020 and beyond.

The NextGen Program is a TransCanada approach to identifying and developing athletes who portray performance results trending towards Potential Podium Performances (5-8 years from Podium 2020 and 2024 Paralympic Games) and are born within 1990-2001.

With this funding, Canadian Blind Sports will be able to secure our coaches for a greater weekly time. This will allow them to develop some gap analyses for each of the identified individual athletes as well as develop mitigating strategies for the athlete-coach tandem.

Further, Canadian Blind Sports will be able to hold training camps with the identified athletes (in a cost sharing strategy) throughout the year so that the National Team coaches and other experts will be able to spend more time developing and modifying skills and abilities of these athletes. Coaches of the individual athletes will be invited to attend these training camps, but costs may not be covered.

Please note:
This funding has only recently been provided to Canadian Blind Sports for 1 year (concluding March 31, 2018), with the potential for subsequent years being funded as well.

We will work with our PSOs to identify athletes for this program for the 2017-2018 competition cycle.

Shane Esau
HPD