Hastings Racecourse owners’ recently released financials show a drop in racetrack revenues. (Photo: Maryse Zeidler)

After years of struggle at Hastings Racecourse in east Vancouver, there were hopes for recovery this summer with the success of horse jockey Mario Gutierrez and a lease extension from the city.

But the most recent report from racecourse owner Great Canadian Gaming shows that track revenues continue to slip. According to its Nov. 7 third-quarter report, racetrack revenues are down $2.5 million, or 22 per cent, from last year at this time. These figures include both of the company’s B.C. racecourses, Hastings Racecourse and Fraser Downs in Surrey.

Those dismal results add more urgency than ever to the company’s and the province’s efforts to figure out what to do about horseracing, an industry that provides 3,600 full-time jobs in B.C., contributes more than $350 million to the province’s economy, and has a long history in Vancouver.

Great Canadian vice-president Howard Blank refused to comment on the financial statement.

Earlier this month, Hastings Racecourse released a press release saying that money spent on wagers had increased five per cent this year.

“Live wagering was up relative to 2011,” said Brian Butters , director of racing sustainability for the BC Horse Racing Industry Management Committee. “Generally speaking, it was a good season.”

But live wagering is only a tiny fraction of overall revenues at Hastings.

Where does the money go?

Of all revenue streams at racecourses, gambling that has nothing to do with horse-racing generates the lion’s share. According to Great Canadian’s report, gambling brings in almost half of the income at its two B.C. racecourses.

In 2004, the province and city agreed that Great Canadian could install 600 slot machines at Hastings Racecourse as an effort to support the struggling track. Each year, the province subsidizes the horseracing industry by giving track operators a portion of revenues from the slots.

As for revenues from wagers on actual horseracing, track owners in B.C. make their money in two ways. Three-quarters of betting revenue is from wagers on races that are broadcast from all over the world. Wagers on live races only account for one quarter of all betting revenues.

“Live racing is such a small part of the financial picture,” said Butters. As for wagering on broadcast races, “[it] hasn’t been as strong as it has in the past.”

A struggling industry

Financial struggles in the horseracing industry aren’t new. Over the years, attendance at horseracing events across North America has dropped. In 2009, the province set up the B.C. Horse Racing Industry Revitalization Initiative to find solutions to rejuvenate the ailing sector.

The majority of horseracing wagers are for races that are broadcast from around the world. (Photo: Maryse Zeidler)

“There really are a couple of generations that didn’t take part in horse racing,” said Butters. A big part of the industry’s plan to improve horseracing in B.C. is to attract younger audiences to the sport.

Superstar jockey Mario Gutierrez played a big part in attracting those audiences this summer. Just one win short of the Triple Crown, he drew large crowds and brought worldwide attention to Hastings Racecourse.

But the 2011 Horse Racing Industry Business Plan said that although marketing efforts contributed to increased attendance, “customer retention poses a challenge given that the quality of the food and facilities at Hastings Park are not impressive.”

Gamblers in Metro Vancouver have a number of glamorous new casinos to chose from – the Edgewater Casino, the River Rock, and Grand Villa. By contrast, Hastings Racecourse is an aging facility on Vancouver’s east side.

The horseracing revitalization committee is preparing to release a five-year plan early in the New Year with suggestions on how to rejuvenate the industry.

“At the end of the day,” said Shane Simpson, MLA for the area “there has to be a some sense of how do you keep the horse industry itself going – which of the investments will allow the breeders and the trainers to do their work and to keep the horses in the circuit.”

Horseracing statistics at Hastings Racecourse and Fraser Downs.

Vancouver Canucks’ goaltender Cory Schneider faces a 2-on-1 at a Thunderbirds’ practice. (Photo: Blake Murphy)

The general consensus has been that nobody wins from the NHL’s current work stoppage. But it’s been a boon to the UBC Thunderbirds men’s ice hockey team in more ways than one.

The Vancouver Canucks have been without a facility to practice in during the NHL lockout. So, for the past few months, Canucks and other NHL players have been sharing practice time and workout facilities with the UBC team at the Doug Mitchell Thunderbird Sports Centre.

In fact, two or three times a week the Sedin brothers, Dan Hamhuis, Kevin Bieksa, Cory Schneider, Manny Malhotra and more have joined the Thunderbirds in full practice sessions, including drills and scrimmages. The unusual situation has been an invaluable learning experience for the Thunderbirds.

For the UBC players, when they can set aside the awe of practicing alongside heroes they would otherwise be watching on television, what separates these players from the rest of the world becomes apparent.

A UBC defenceman gets a lesson from a pair of Canucks. (Photo: Blake Murphy)

“It’s been great, it’s a treat having them out there,” said Dillon Wagner, a freshman forward for UBC. “It’s been really beneficial to us, too. We see them in the gym, and the work ethic those guys have, off the rink and in drills, they’re always working hard and trying to make themselves better. It makes you appreciate how hard it is to get where they are and how hard they worked to get there.”Head coach Milan Dragicevic has also appreciated the infusion of such a dedicated and talented group of players to his practices.

“It’s been a great experience,” said Dragicevic. “We’ve learned so much from them. They’re professionals, they’re some of the best players in the world. It shows our guys how hard they work, how they prepare and how they do little things right.”

The impact of practicing with NHL-calibre players is mostly intangible. The Canucks aren’t sharing power-play tactics, and talent isn’t transferable through osmosis.

Still, the proof of the potential impact is evident in the early season success for UBC. The Thunderbirds are currently in third place in the Canada West Conference with an 8-3-1 record. If they continue at the current pace, this season will be UBC’s best finish in terms of points per contest since 1971-72.

Dragicevic is quick to credit the NHL players with bringing a certain level of intensity to practices that might be difficult to sustain otherwise.

“I don’t think it hurts,” Dragicevic explained. “It elevates our practice when they’re out with us. Our guys work hard as it is, but when you’re playing with Daniel (Sedin) and Henrik (Sedin) and (Dan) Hamhuis, our guys pick it up a little bit.”

The UBC Thunderbirds have experienced a dramatic rise in performance this season. They currently sit third in the Canada West conference at 8-3-1, a pace that would see them finish with their best record since 1970-71. (Graph: Blake Murphy)

But the success on the ice isn’t the only area where the NHL lockout is having a positive impact on the program. Bieksa’s Buddies, a charity game put on by Kevin Bieksa and other NHL players on the UBC campus, was a huge success. The carryover from that game, along with the additional interest in UBC hockey given the lack of NHL action, has helped improve attendance and atmosphere for Thunderbird home games, too.

“We did get a pretty big spike after the Bieksa game,” said Leon Denefeld, the coordinator of marketing and promotions for UBC athletics. “Because of the short season and different promotions, it’s tough to compare apples to apples for attendance. But hockey fans have realized it’s pretty good hockey. There’s some huge upside to (the Canucks) practicing here.”

For students and non-students alike, the UBC Thunderbirds have provided an alternative medium for the hockey-starved fan. While the Vancouver Giants Junior A team certainly provides one option, the lockout is still bringing people to the Thunderbird sports centre who may not have come otherwise.

“I went to the game for some cheap entertainment, to see friends and to see some hockey. Plus I was lonely,” said Matt Douglas, a non-student who attended a Thunderbirds game in late October. “I likely would have been watching the Canucks at home rather than venturing out to watch live hockey, if they were playing.”

The fact that the lockout is dragging on is, without question, harmful. The potential loss of interest in the sport, the lost revenue for teams and players, and the impact on local businesses, breweries and even scalpers all loom as impactful negatives.

But for at least one small group, this dark cloud has a silver lining.

“It’d be nice to watch them on TV and actually enjoy what they can do,” Wagner admitted. “But it’s nice having them out there.”

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The usually packed “scalper’s corner” remains empty on cancelled game days.

The NHL lockout is going to have a significant financial impact on many ticket scalpers. But hockey fans aren’t showing any sympathy towards the industry’s least popular profession, especially after desperate scalpers tried to profit from a charity game Wednesday.

With the NHL officially cancelling October games, scalpers have been scrambling to find new sources of revenue. For some part-timers, it’s a matter of losing pocket money but, for full-time scalpers, the coming months could be difficult.

“For some guys, this is their whole income,” shared Paul, an independent ticket scalper standing at the corner of Beatty and Georgia, before being temporarily distracted by a pair of young girls looking for Justin Bieber tickets. “And there’s significant cash spent by season ticket holders, that’s all tied up.”

The cheapest season seat package for the Canucks costs over $2,000 before service charges and associated fees. Since most scalpers hold many seats in a variety of price ranges, scalpers are left right now with a lot of cash tied up in inventory they can’t sell.

Scalpers can make between 60- to 100-per-cent profit on tickets, meaning every lost sale is significant in terms of real dollars. For a scalper who may hold four seats in both the upper and lower bowl selling at the minimum price found on Stub Hub, that scalper will be losing out on approximately $460 of profit per home game lost, and these are very conservative estimates. Over the course of an entire season, a typical scalper would be looking at $19,000 in unrealized profit in addition to the inconvenience of having temporarily lost his initial cash outlay.

A ticket scalper attempts to sell tickets to the Justin Bieber concert an hour before the show.

For others in the ticket re-sale industry who are less exposed, things don’t look quite as bleak. Ryan, a ticket scalper for Showtime Tickets, thinks he and his company are prepared enough to weather the storm.

“The impact won’t be too bad,” explained Ryan, who declined to provide his last name given the generally negative opinion the public has towards scalpers. “We hold enough other seats to get by, but we’ll miss the cash flow. I won’t be making the same commissions, but I won’t be eating Kraft Dinner.”

Scalping is not illegal in British Columbia, but it is certainly frowned upon, considering the economic tax it charges to fans hoping to see a game. A blogger for Rate Supermarket, a Canadian blog focused on providing money tips and interpreting economic news for citizens, identified the loss to scalpers as the only positive of the lockout.

Not quite everyone is negative about scalpers.

“I’m okay with ticket scalpers,” says Chris Pope, a radio broadcaster and avid hockey fan. “If you pay over the printed price, then it’s your own fault.”

But a recent scalping escapade fanned public anger, provoking many of them to be less willing to look the other way.

While the NHL and the players’ association continued to negotiate to save the season, he charity game being put on by Kevin Bieksa of the Canucks on Oct. 17, showcasing Bieksa’s Buddies against the UBC Thunderbirds, saw $20 tickets surface online for up to $75. That outraged Bieksa and other participants.

“While I don’t know any scalpers personally, as a general rule I don’t have a lot of sympathy,” said Thomas Drance, a sports blogger for Canucks Army.

“Any idiot could see that this lockout was likely months ago, and you’re either prepared for that eventuality, or you’re desperately and despicably charging seven times face value for tickets to a Bieksa’s Buddies game that is being played to benefit charity.”

Profiting from a charity game is never going to be a popular choice, but some scalpers say they are left without many options in the short term.

The first regular-season Canucks home game was scheduled to take place on Saturday, Oct. 13, and three more were scheduled for October. Luckily for Paul, he has a day job to help him weather the storm. But his colleagues might not be in the same position.

“A lot of these guys have day jobs, so it’s just a little money off the top,” Paul explained. “But there are guys out here who have this as a full-time job.”

For those who fall on hard times in the coming months, it would be wise not to look to hockey fans for sympathy.

Sheereen Aminuddin (right) and her mother, Zuraida Ali, both wear the hijab, on and off the field (Photo by Suzanne Ahearne)

But she was worried because, like many Muslim girls, Sheereen wears a hijab. So the 14-year-old Maple Ridge Secondary student signed up for the Golden Ears United Soccer Club only after checking with the league to ensure there were no regulations related to the headscarf that would prohibit her from playing.

Other girls — and women — haven’t been so lucky.

Ever since an 11-year-old girl was kicked out of a soccer game in Quebec in 2007 for wearing a hijab, doing so has been contested on soccer pitches around the world on the basis of reasons ranging from religious symbolism to safety.

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the organization in charge of regulating professional soccer and setting the rules of the game for all levels of the sport all over the world, has stood by decisions to exclude hijabis. Most commonly, such decisions have been attributed to concerns over safety — this despite the fact that not a single hijab-related injury has ever been reported.

On July 2, the technical arm of FIFA, The International Football Association Board (IFAB), will vote on whether or not hijab can be worn while playing soccer, just three weeks before women’s soccer kicks off at the 2012 Olympic games in London.

Sidelining hijabis

When 11-year-old Asmahan Mansour, a player on the Nepean Hotspurs Selects team, refused to remove her hijab during the 2007 Quebec match, the referee justified his decision to eject her from the game using Law 4 from FIFA’s rule booklet, which states: “A player must not use equipment or wear anything that is dangerous to himself or another player (including any kind of jewellery).”

Her hijab posed a choking hazard, the referee alleged.

Asmahan, her parents, coach and teammates contested the decision, but the Quebec Soccer Federation, Canadian Soccer Association and IFAB backed the referee. IFAB said that referees should make the ultimate call on what is deemed dangerous.

At their 2007 annual meeting, members of IFAB intensified the issue by adding a new section to Law 4, making it possible for referees to prevent anyone bearing a religious symbol — which the hijab is intended as — from playing: “The basic compulsory equipment must not have any political, religious or personal statements,” it reads.

This addition to the law echoed France’s banning of conspicuous religious symbols in schools in 2004, which included hijabs, turbans, crosses and yarmulkes. Opposition to the ban from Muslim groups was particularly strong as Islam is the second-most practiced religion in France.

In 2011, the debate over hijab was thrust back into the spotlight when FIFA prevented the Iranian women’s national soccer team from participating in the 2012 Olympic qualifiers due to the players’ refusal to remove their hijabs.

IFAB lifted the official hijab ban on March 6 of this year, citing a lack of medical proof that the hijab poses a strangulation risk. FIFA and IFAB had faced a great deal of pressure to overturn the ban, largely from Prince Ali Bin Al Hussein, FIFA’s official vice president from Asia. Al Hussein is an advocate for women’s rights in his home country of Jordan.

Even after the ban was lifted, a French referee in the city of Narbonne would not officiate a women’s soccer game on March 19 on account of players wearing hijabs on the Petit-Bard Montpellier team. The teams played a friendly match instead and their league, Languedoc-Roussillon, will have to decide whether the result is considered official or if a rematch is needed.

The final vote in July on hijab safety will be based on “an accelerated review of health and safety issues,” according to an IFAB press release.

FIFA will cast four votes on behalf of its 208 member associations, while the English, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish associations will get one vote each.

But for many young, female Muslim players who dreamed of soccer stardom before the ban, the vote may come too late.

Passion to play

All six Elmasry sisters grew up in Libya and Burnaby and never far from a soccer ball. Pictured are Hanin (left), Asma and Nada (right) (Photograph by Suzanne Ahearne)

Nada Elmasry and her sister Hanin vividly remember the events leading to FIFA’s ban. The Palestinian sisters, now undergraduate students at Simon Fraser University, immigrated from Libya with their parents and four other sisters around the time when Asmahan was removed from the 2007 Quebec match. Nada loved playing soccer back home.

“It was the only sport people knew,” she said. “If you have a soccer ball, that’s good; if not, you take a bunch of socks, put them together and form a ball with it.”

But she was worried her hijab would prevent her from playing in Canada.

According to Jose Branco, the referee development coordinator at the BC Soccer Association, all soccer associations around the world, and their teams, follow FIFA’s regulations. Even if a league is not part of a provincial association, a referee can call up FIFA’s laws of the game to make decisions.

Nada begged Hanin to join a Burnaby team with her, so she wouldn’t be the only hijabi. Both sisters remember feeling nervous about the power their league’s referees had over whether or not they could play.

Even after teammates and coaches accepted the girls, Nada and Hanin remained worried as to how referees would react to their headscarves, pants or long-sleeved shirts. Sometimes they felt singled out. A referee once told Nada that he needed to make sure she wasn’t wearing anything under her pants and then checked her shoes twice. She had no idea what he was looking for.

For Nada, FIFA’s ban perpetuated negative stereotypes about Muslim women and prevented girls from pursuing their dreams of being soccer players.

“Just loving the game and knowing that you can never be [a professional] player…it hurts,” said Hanin.

Nada agreed. As a child she dreamed of becoming a professional soccer player and seeing FIFA ban the hijab was discouraging. But for her, the choice is clear.

“It’s part of my identity. Headscarf comes first,” Nada said.

New design safe, but not secure

FIFA has enlisted Capsters, an accessory company in the Netherlands, to design a hijab that satisfies IFAB’s laws. The final vote in July will determine the safety of the new design, which has Velcro that would come apart easily if pulled at in order to avoid a strangulation hazard.

Cindy van den Bremen, Capsters’ founder, has been designing special hijabs for girls in the Netherlands since 1999, and was approached by Al Hussein directly to produce a safety-tested hijab for FIFA.

But she said the task is a challenging one. FIFA has only requested that Capsters design a hijab that avoids strangulation, but offered no guidance as to, for example, how quickly the hijab should come off.

Van den Bremen is trying to strike a balance between safety and not defeating the purpose of the hijab with her design. She has received feedback from some of the girls who have tested her company’s headgear.

“They said they felt that the Velcro released too quickly, so we made it a bit firmer,” she said. “But still, when you pull it, it opens rather easy.”

Sheereen, Nada and Hanin all said that they would never pursue professional soccer if they knew they had to wear a hijab that could come off easily and force them to be uncovered in public.

It’s about exclusion

Sheereen’s mother, Zuraida Ali, has a deep connection to soccer; her father was on Singapore’s national team. She loves seeing her daughter involved in sports as a way to be active and build confidence.

Ali is still trying to understand the motivation behind FIFA’s ban.

She said she would accept the validity of the ban and the Capsters easily pulled-apart hijab if FIFA could prove that hijabs pose a risk of strangulation to the players who wear them. But Ali is angry because, so far, there is no proof. She said safety is just an excuse for prejudice.

Farrah Khan, a social worker and activist based out of Toronto, agrees. Khan started an organization called Right2Wear, which supports Muslim women in their choice to wear what they want. Its mandate is to create awareness that hijab is a personal choice.

Khan says FIFA’s way of dealing with hijab on the pitch has created a glass ceiling for girls like Sheereen. For Khan, FIFA’s decisions “ban[ned] a group of women from playing sports.”

Like Ali, she questions the motivation behind the original ban. She feels it targeted Muslim women.

The United Nations (UN) supports Muslim women and their right to wear hijab and play soccer. According to a UN press release, Special Adviser Wilfried Lemke sent a letter to FIFA President Sepp Blatter about the issue.

“As the governing body of the world’s most popular sport, I believe FIFA has the responsibility to ensure that everyone has an equal chance to participate in football, without any barriers and regardless of gender, race, ability, age, culture or religious beliefs,” Lemke wrote.

Ali and Khan both hope that, for the sake of girls like Sheereen, Lemke’s words are heard and FIFA votes in favour of the Capsters hijab on July 2.

“My hope is that in the end they make the right decision. The right decision is the right to play for all women,” said Khan.

The Vancouver Eclipse play every Friday from noon to 1 pm at Hillcrest rink.

The Vancouver Eclipse visually impaired hockey team has a new home at Hillcrest Community Centre.

The building that hosted the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic curling competitions now houses Vancouver’s only visually impaired hockey team.

“We like the size of it now,” said Graham Foxcroft, a visually impaired player. “It’s an actual hockey-size rink and it’s very nice.”

The team played at Riley Park rink for 15 years. They moved, along with the centre’s other programs, to Hillcrest when the old rink closed.

Hillcrest rink has an NHL-sized ice surface and the building is mostly concrete construction trimmed with smooth honey coloured wood. Riley Park rink was mostly wood construction and was smaller than regulation-sized ice.

“The echoes are different,” said Gary Steeves, co-founder of and goalie for the Eclipse. “The first week we played [at Hillcrest] it was really weird because when people talked at the other end they had this delayed echo … You just have to get used to the sound.”

Sound is key to visually impaired and blind players. They rely on the noise made by specialized pucks to track the play.

“When a puck comes off a stick, the impact sound of it really gives a lot of information about direction and speed,” said Steeves. “How you react to it, I don’t know. Honestly, it’s instinctual.”

The rules of the game have been modified to accommodate the needs of visually impaired players. For example, goals cannot be scored in the upper half of the net because goalies (all of whom must be visually impaired or blind) cannot hear the puck when it is in the air.

Communication is also crucial to blind hockey. Each team has a few sighted players who keep the game flowing — they control the play and describe what is happening on the ice.

Being part of the team

The Vancouver Eclipse play with a hollow metal puck that contains noise-making ball bearings.

The Eclipse started off the ice in 1995 when Steeves and Rob Commozzi got together and formed the team. Vancouver had nothing like it at the time.

“Sport does a lot of things for a lot of people, but I think it really does more for the visually impaired and other disabilities. It allows them to be part of something that probably a lot of their life they weren’t part of,” said Brian Cowie, a visually impaired player.

“When a little kid can’t see very well, he can’t play on the baseball team, he can’t play on the football team, he can’t play on the soccer team. But this allows them to be part of a team,” said Cowie.

The team currently has eight visually impaired and blind players and about six sighted players. They divide into two teams and play pick-up against each other every Friday.

Last season, the Eclipse played a three game tournament at Défi Sportif, an annual multisport event held in Montreal for athletes with disabilities.

“For the first time ever there were blind hockey players from Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal all playing together on the same team,” said Steeves. “That’s never been done before.”

Eclipse members hope to attend the tournament again this year.

Involving more people

“The constant challenge is always to get new visually impaired guys to come out,” said Patrick Sheridan, a long-time sighted team member. “Especially [for] somebody who’s been visually impaired all their life and who has never played hockey, the idea of coming out on the ice and trying to play a game which is totally foreign [to them], I imagine, is pretty intimidating.”

The Eclipse want more people to get involved in blind hockey through tournaments like Défi Sportif and through the work Courage Canada is doing to develop a national blind hockey league with a standard puck and rules.

“Sports is a really good vehicle for improving people’s self-esteem and giving them confidence. And if they get confidence in whatever sport or activity they’re doing, then they can transfer that out into their normal lives,” said Steeves.

“I enjoy playing and I enjoy the fact that I’m helping the visually impaired guys,” said Sheridan. “Although a lot of these guys can play hockey a whole lot better than me, so I’m not sure who’s helping who!”

“It’s just coming every Friday and playing hockey,” said Foxcoft. “Just get out there and do it. … Don’t be afraid.”

Former Ti-Cat Pat Brady entered graduate business school the year after he retired

Pat Brady snuck out of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats’ team hotel early on a game day morning in 1987. He caught a cab to UBC, wrote the Graduate Management Admission Test and made it back in time for the afternoon team meeting.

He learned weeks later that he had scored in the 98th percentile on the four-hour exam.

The long-snapper retired after five seasons and earned a MBA from the University of Western Ontario. He now works at a downtown Vancouver investment firm.

Don Taylor retired from the Lions in 1984 after seven seasons. The former running back studied business in England and these days balances a finance career with serving as the president of the B.C. Lions Alumni Association.

He encourages players to begin thinking about life after football as soon as they enter the league.

“Just like you’re prepared to go out and play your opponent this week  you need to be prepared for the next stage of your life – because it will come,” said Taylor. “Those that are prepared, the transition will be a lot smoother. Those that aren’t … it’s going to be a very difficult time.”

Players that successfully transition to a career after football often prepare while still playing by working outside of the sport, continuing their education or networking with alumni.

Those who don’t often lack transferable job skills and struggle without the support network once offered by their teammates and coaches.

The CBC’s The Fifth Estate recounted the addiction and substance abuse issues that led a number of retired players to premature deaths, including former Edmonton Eskimo David Boone who shot himself at his Point Roberts home in 2005.

“We’re a family. Today we all have regrets for not phoning him as often,” said former player Tom Towns to the Edmonton Sun in 2005 of Boone’s suicide.

Post-football struggles

Financial troubles also are common for former professional athletes.

Almost 80 per cent of retired National Football League players were bankrupt or under financial stress within two years of retirement, according to a 2009 Sports Illustrated article.

NFL players earned an average of $2 million per season during the 2010 season, according to published reports.

CFL players typically pocket much less than their American football counterparts.

It is union policy not to release individual player salaries. Dividing the league’s 2011 salary cap of $4.2 million between 46 roster players produces an average salary of just over $91,000.

That figure doesn’t account for the marked salary disparity towards players at higher-profile skill positions such as quarterback, running back and receiver.

The average CFL career lasts 3.2 years, according to figures gathered by the union since the mid-1990s.

Alumni assistance

Taylor leaned forward and pressed his arms atop the boardroom table in his North Vancouver financial office. His voice hardened as he described seeing  former players reaching into their own pockets to help colleagues who fell on hard times. Witnessing those acts of generosity convinced him to make the alumni more active in assisting retired players into post-football careers.

“Building those relationships is important,” he said. “Finding a job is not necessarily about your resume it’s about who you know.”

Team-based and league-wide alumni associations also provide current and former players with networking and mentoring opportunities.

Taylor transformed the annual Lions alumni golf tournament from an occasion where former players swapped stories and ate burgers, into a corporate event rife with opportunities to meet professional contacts.

The Lions-run Waterboys program links the team and business community through its over 120 members, according to the team website.

Education and versatility

Brady knew when he was playing that he had no long-term career in long-snapping. He chuckled at the violence inherent to his former career from his office, as he surveyed the office towers through the window of his 26th-floor Burrard Street office.

“You get smashed with your head between your legs. It’s not fun,” he said. “The smart teams try to injure you.”

Brady pursued careers in sales and real estate while playing, but fell back on his graduate business degree after retirement to carve out a career in venture capital.

He said his father, former Argonaut and Lion offensive lineman Bob Brady, drove him hard to keep up his studies during his university and professional football career.

“There’s a ton of emotion behind pro sports that you don’t get in any other job. You can’t get wrapped up in that and get too isolated and lose the discipline to make sure you keep developing other aspects of your future,” said Brady. “It’s very easy to fall into the trap of just being a football player and nothing else.”

Working while playing

Gerald Roper has co-owned a travel business since 1989. He retired from the CFL in 1992.

Office scuttlebutt replaced the familiar support of locker room banter for Roper.

“It’s all about team,” he said. “You all got to like each other.”

The former CFL all-star paced around the office in jeans, a plain white t-shirt and a green vest. He reminded an employee to rest up that night in lieu of his upcoming 21st birthday party.

His business does $17 million-per-year in sales of travel, accommodations and meeting spaces to labour unions for conventions and conferences.

Roper achieved financial and vocational security by splitting time between work and football: a plan he strongly advises today’s players to follow.

“Get a job working just so you understand what it’s like to get up every morning and pack a lunch. Go to work and do like regular people do because sooner or later … you’re going to be a regular person,” he said.

“Nobody is going to remember anybody who played for anyone, that’s the way it is.”

Stricter eligibility rules have prompted students to leave teams or have made them ineligible. And SFU teams – the only non-U.S. member of the NCAA – have struggled in early season competition.

School officials justify the move out of Canadian varsity sports by arguing it provides better competition, affords cheaper travel and offers more generous scholarships.

Related: American athletic competition a constant in SFU history

SFU teams now compete in NCAA Division II's Great Northwest Athletic Conference

SFU Clan teams are now provisional members of the NCAA Division II Great Northwest Athletic Conference (GNAC) and compete against teams from Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Montana and Idaho.

“To be the best, athletes need to compete against the best, and I believe that by joining the NCAA, Simon Fraser University is putting themselves in a position to do just that,” Jay Triano, an SFU alumnus and coach of the NBA’s Toronto Raptors, told the SFU Athletics website.

But competitively, NCAA teams so far have mostly overmatched SFU. The Clan football team, with 59 new players on a 94-man roster, lost all nine of its conference games by an average of 21 points apiece.

Men’s basketball begins its season with 11 new players on the court. It was, according to the team’s website, “the biggest numerical roster change since the program’s inception.”

Similarly the women’s basketball team starts the season with four returning players on a roster of just nine.

“We had a grad class of eight kids and we lost six more . . . some wanted to get another year out of staying in Canada. Most transferred schools,” said Bruce Langford, the women’s basketball coach. “We lost 11 kids. Losing 11 kids is impossible to replace.”

NCAA rules permit most athletes to play four years of varsity sports, as opposed to the five years of eligibility under Canadian Interuniversity Sport rules.  The new regulations meant student athletes entering their fifth year suddenly found themselves without a team.

“Everybody was kind of confused, worried about eligibility, and people were wondering if they were able to play,” said Milos Zivkovic, a former SFU slotback who transferred to the University of Calgary.

New recruits also had to decide whether going to SFU was worth the lost year, or whether to transfer to another Canadian school to play the full five.

Rules and regulations

Compliance with more detailed NCAA regulations has been the biggest difference for students, coaches and administrators, said Scott McLean, SFU’s sports information director.

“It’s so much more regimented in the NCAA . . . you have to make sure all your ‘t’s are crossed and ‘i’s are dotted,” said McLean. “It’s much more reliant on self-reporting in the CIS.”

Boosters – supporters of a particular school, team or player – are also strictly forbidden from participating in the recruiting process. Gifts, off-season job offers and even simple conversations between players and boosters can attract the attention of NCAA compliance officials.

This year the NCAA’s regulations manual for Division II schools and students runs 365 pages.

The sanctions for violating NCAA rules include forfeiture of games, scholarships or post-season play. The SFU athletics website now warns athletes to “ask before you act” to ensure compliance.

Competitive struggles

SFU has struggled to consistently compete with the NCAA’s higher-caliber teams.

The Clan football team finished the season without a conference win, but earned a 27-20 victory over UBC in the exhibition Shrum Bowl rivalry game. The women’s volleyball team also struggled, ending the year with four wins and 18 losses.

SFU hopes to attract high-calibre student-athletes with more lucrative NCAA scholarships

Other teams are either in mid-season or have yet to begin competition.

Expectations were high. SFU enrolls more than double the students of even the biggest GNAC schools.

SFU’s soccer teams, at least, have enjoyed success. The men’s team won its GNAC conference championship and the women finished second.

Full rides
NCAA schools attract better athletes and supply superior competition by offering lucrative athletic scholarships to recruits.

These full-ride scholarships provide tuition and money for books, housing and meals. In contrast, Canadian schools are limited to offering recruits a tuition and fees waiver.

Alexis Bwenge knows first-hand the value of a full ride. The former B.C. Lions fullback attended the NCAA Division I University of Kentucky on a full scholarship.

“I came out of five years of school with not a dollar owed to anyone and if I had gone to school in Canada it might have been different,” said Bwenge. “The scholarship let me be financially independent.”

Tradition

The demands of the regular GNAC season make annual SFU-UBC rivalry games, such as the Shrum Bowl and the Barbara Rae Cup in women’s basketball, increasingly tough to schedule.

Rivalry games between the two Vancouver-area schools survived SFU’s switch to American leagues, but it remains to be seen whether coaches will be willing to risk the extra wear on their players for tradition’s sake.

“I’m not so certain how feasible it is, given our scheduling and playoff formulas, to schedule very many CIS games over the years,” said Langford. “As a matter of fact, I don’t think it’s very likely we’ll be able to do that.”

Simon Fraser University’s recent move to the NCAA reflects the school’s history of offering student-athletes a Canadian education with an American varsity athletics experience.

SFU has competed in American-based athletics since the school's 1965 inception

SFU teams competed in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics when they began play in 1965. The NAIA is a U.S.-based governing body that rivals the NCAA but is composed of smaller universities and colleges.

The migration of NAIA rivals to the larger NCAA led SFU to apply for membership in 1997. SFU’s bid was unsuccessful.

SFU joined Canadian Interuniversity Sport in 2001 as a new member of the Canada West Conference.

Some SFU teams continued to play a mix of Canadian and NAIA opponents despite being formal members in CIS.

SFU re-applied for NCAA membership in 2007 and became the first Canadian school to join Division II a year later.

The university announced its intention to leave CIS for the NCAA in July 2009, but its final season in Canadian play closed with controversy.

Canada West stripped the football team of two wins for using an ineligible player and the
conference hastened SFU’s departure when it placed the program on probation for the 2009-10 season.

The University of British Columbia followed SFU’s NCAA ambitions, but sought to join the higher-profile Division I. UBC’s Executive deferred a decision to join Division II in April 2009.

NCAA’s Division I is familiar to casual sports fans through high-profile events including the Final Four basketball tournament held every March and the well-publicized annual slate of football bowl games held early in the new year.

Any given Saturday at Burnaby Lake Park, music professor Nikolai Maloff and computer programmer Geoff Dryer can be found engaging in a showdown of aeronautic spectacle. In the skies above, lightweight, mini-engined planes dodge gliders with 13 foot wingspans.

Below the air traffic, fellow flyers unpack hand-painted model airplanes of various sizes from the backseat of their cars.

So long as the rain holds off, flyers congregate at the park every weekend to loop-de-loop through the skies. Yet come late January, the group was told it would be grounded – literally – for nearly three months of valuable practice time.

A typical Sunday pre-noon launch for Burnaby Lake Park's Hoods Up Flyers

Model plane enthusiasts are one of the many groups prohibited from flying during the Winter Games due to airspace restrictions imposed by Transport Canada, even though security officials do not see such groups as a threat.

From opening day of the Games on January 29 to the closing of the Paralympics on March 24, hobbyists such as parachuters, hang gliders and balloonists must also refrain from using the airspace within three areas clustered around two central sites -  Vancouver International Airport and Whistler Athlete’s Village.

“Massive overkill”

“We’ve been told we cannot fly for almost two months. All of the members of the club feel that this is a massive overkill,” said Brad Trent, president of Hood’s Up Flyers, an electric-only club that has been flying on an allotted field in Burnaby.

“There is no way that a group of guys at Burnaby Lake Park are going to be a risk to athletes, officials or any other groups at the Olympics.”

Some flyers have invested upwards of $100 000 in flying equipment and fees for practice space.

Three months of restricted flying practice will affect their performance in highly anticipated international competitions that occur throughout the summer months.

Military enforcement

The report outlining the restrictions warns that all traffic within the designated airspace will be monitored by surveillance radar during the Olympics. Unauthorized aerial activity will be subject to intercept by military aircraft.

“The flight procedures and restrictions are similar to those implemented for other major international events,” said Sara Hof, a representative for Transport Canada, in an e-mail. “They are based on internationally accepted standards.”

No incident of model plane employment in a terrorist attack has yet been reported. Many of the Hoods Up members pointed out that anything with wheels or wings could pose as a security threat during the Games.

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A local Canadian team poses at the regional model flying finals in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho (Photo: Geoff Dryer)

Staff Sargeant Mike Cote with the Vancouver 2010 Integrated Security Unit acknowledged that model plane clubs have been in operation for many years and are a part of the community.

“These are not illegal groups. The club that meets at the same field every Wednesday afternoon or Saturday morning?” said Cote. “We’re certainly not concerned with them.”

Scott Esplen is the president of the Radio Control Flying Club of British Columbia, a group of 160 flyers that are currently struggling to find a usable aerial field in the Vancouver area. Esplen’s group will also be hit by airspace restrictions.

“I’m very responsible when I fly, I don’t take safety for granted at all,” said Esplen. “I don’t know if security is worried about something going out of control, but if they think someone is going to do something on purpose, it’s going to be the unorganized person.”

“They’re not stopping people with bad intentions, they’re punishing the guys that are doing it right. I think it’s crazy.”

“Old men flying planes”

The Hoods Up Flyers forwarded concerns about the restrictions to the Model Aeronautics Association of Canada. The association offers liability protection and acts as a government liaison for clubs all over Canada.

The relationship between model plane flyers and governing authorities that regulate model clubs, such as Transport Canada, has been positive in the past. Association president Richard Barlow was annoyed by the restrictions, but also hesitant to push the issue further.

“We’re talking about an association of close to 12 000 people that fly model aircraft recreationally, for fun and competition,” said Barlow. “Canada competes in world championships, we are insured for $5 million in liability, and we train our members to fly responsibly.”

Members of Hoods Up Flyers are skeptical that the issue will receive any attention if Transport Canada’s restrictions are challenged. While some are outraged, others seek a compromise that Geoff Dryer, vice president of the club, said is far from likely.

“We’ve got no political pulse,” said Dryer. “A bunch of old men flying planes is not a great lobby.”

The World Wheelchair Curling Championships were held there to determine who goes to the 2010 Paralympic Games.

Produced by Heather Amos, Ameila Bellamy-Royds, Miné Salkin and Alexis Stoymenoff.

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