A Kincardine resident is hoping that community response to flag football will lead to the formation of a tackle football team in the town.
Dan Ogilvie, who is one of the directors for the Kincardine Football Association, says that with the success of the flag football skills and drills training camps that were held in August and October, the community interest is leaning toward the sport making a comeback.
“We’re trying to bring football back to the area, so we had two separate goals. We wanted to establish a flag football league for youth outside of the school system, so we partnered with Under Armour to get that started,” he said in an interview with Bayshore News. “We’ve had two very successful skills and drills camps already, and we’re hoping to run a flag football league for U6 to U18-aged kids in the Spring of 2025, so it would run in May and June. So far, we have registration started for that and it’s going very well, so we hope to have that underway in the Spring. I think we will, just based on the registration numbers.”
The interest in flag football quickly led to a new goal: to start a high school football team back up at Kincardine District Senior School by the Fall of 2025, after being absent since the early 1980s.
Ogilvie started a GoFundMe fundraiser to support the endeavour, with a goal of raising $30,000.
He says that the idea to raise that money is mainly to get training equipment and uniforms, but also to curb expensive registration fees and travel costs once the team gets started.
“It’s quite costly. Since this is a high school team, we want to run it as affordably as possible,” Ogilvie said. “Ideally, we’d like the kids to be able to play and not have to spend a lot of money at all if possible, so we want to keep those registration costs down.”
He’s hoping that KDSS will have a football team ready to play in Fall 2025.
“I think we’ll be close to that goal. We’ve been able to source some used equipment at a much more for us, so that helps a lot. Our fundraising goals remain the same, because even the used equipment, the helmets for example, have to be refurbished every couple of years, so even if we get a lot of helmets, we’d still have to fix a lot of those up. We’d still need to buy uniforms and things of that nature as well.”
He says that this is why he is leaving the GoFundMe campaign for as long as possible, because every donation will go toward the proposed new KDSS team, ideally to set them up for years of success.
“We didn’t really put a time limit on it because initially, if we had to buy all new equipment, we’d have to order by a specific time, but now that we’ve been able to source some stuff at more affordable prices, and the people selling to us are not on a great time crunch let’s say, so we do have more time,” he says. “In the future, if people donated money, it would always go toward the program anyway because every year it’s going to cost a certain amount of money to run a football program because it’s a very big team, typically 35-40 kids can play on that team, so you have to outfit them all, provide transportation, training, all sorts of things like that.
Meanwhile, Ogilvie says he’s happy with the turnout they had for their flag football skills camps, with August’s session being attended by 120-130 kids in all age groups, while October brought 70 attendees.
He says that it’s a good start for a house league outside of the school system that will range from U6 to U18 children and youth.
“The parents seem very enthusiastic, especially with flag. We thought the flag would be a good way to introduce the sport to a younger group of kids, so when they got to high school, they’d be interested in playing high school football as well. The flag will also be right up to U18 as well, so if they wanted to play another sport that didn’t require tackling as much as football, that option will be available to boys and girls as well.”
He hopes that on the flag football side of things, they’d have enough enrolment to sustain a house league that would then be able to also compete against other centres in communities like Kitchener, Guelph, and Burlington, which have their own Under Armour Flag Football programs.
While the association takes a “The more teams, the better” approach to flag football enrolment, it’s an advantage to boys and girls who want to play a sport that doesn’t require tackling. Ogilvie says that while the flag football program would be based in Kincardine, they’d be happy to accept kids from Walkerton or Port Elgin, for example, with the hopes of having more municipal programs popping up in the future.