A decade of sport at UOIT

By Joel Wittnebel/The Oshawa Express

It started out as a pipe dream.

Over the past 10 years, the athletics department at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology has grown from managing only a couple of sports to a full-fledged community institution that not only serves as a proving ground for top athletes, but top scholars as well.

This fall marks the 10th year the Ridgebacks will be competing on the university sport circuit and for Scott Barker, the university’s athletics director who was on the ground floor of the program’s creation, it is something special.

“There’s very few people that can say they were part of starting a varsity athletics program from scratch, which is literally what we did,” he says.

In 2006, UOIT opened its varsity sports programming with offerings of tennis and rowing. Since then, the program has grown to include a multitude sports, including men’s and women’s teams in hockey, soccer and curling, as well as women’s lacrosse, dance and golf.

And while the rowing program is still going strong, earning its fourth – and third straight – appearance at the national championships this past season, the tennis program has wrapped up its final season and will be replaced with badminton in the fall.

When the athletics department opened its doors a decade ago, Barker says the administration made a checklist of approximately 200 items. Each year, they have been checking off the boxes as the programs grow.

With that growth comes success. In recent years, UOIT is seeing more and more historic finishes and program bests than ever before.

In men’s hockey, the team smashed the program record for wins, earning 18 last season – the previous record being 12 wins during the 2010/2011 season. The success advanced the squad to the second round of the Ontario University Athletics (OUA) playoffs for the first time in program history after knocking off Queens.

While the woman may not have seen the same success, missing out on the OUA playoffs, the team did end on a high note, finishing the season with a three-game win streak for the first time in program history.

Men’s and women’s soccer have also both seen historic seasons in recent years, as the men’s qualified for the post-season for the second straight year and the women earning an OUA bronze medal in 2014/2015 season.

Not to be left out, men’s and women’s curling qualified for the OUA championships last season and the university’s dance squad also saw a historic finish, dancing their way to a pair of overall marks at the Flashdance competition in Richmond Hill, a first in program history.

The golf team has also consistently sent its memners to national and CIS championships and last year marked the first time a golfer was named UOIT athlete of the year when James Krantz took home the honour.

Even with all the athletic accolades, Barker says the programs are about much more than that.

“The thing that makes you the happiest is to see the success of the athletes and coaches,” he says.

“They put so much hard work and time and commitment into their sport and you see them develop friendships, you get to be a part of them celebrating championships and going on to these experiences they get to have at university.”

With training camps for the soccer clubs getting underway this month and fall just around the corner, Barker says the university hopes to have something in place to honour each of the programs throughout the season.

“Over the course of the year, with every sport we’re hoping to integrate some kind of special moment for them to celebrate,” he says.