By Jody Jewers, Editor, The Sport Section
Justin LeBlanc has done his share of mat work.
The head coach of the Yarmouth Wrestling Club started out in the sport while in high school and founded the club seven years ago. Up until this past summer, there had been one constant.
“The mats that we used when I started the wrestling school were the same ones that I used when I was wrestling in high school from 2006 to 2009,” says LeBlanc. “Our old mats were three pieces and they weighed about 700 to 800 pounds, and it would take 10 to 11 athletes and a couple of coaches to get each piece up on the stage in our gym to store them.”
The club had looked into purchasing new mats from a company in Alberta, but the price tag came in at about $15,000 plus another $5,000 for shipping. LeBlanc put the word out through his connections that the club was in the market for new mats and an opportunity arose with the Canada Games being held in Newfoundland and Labrador this past summer.
“Newfoundland needed about 10 mats, I believe, for the Canada Games and they wound up keeping five of them for their clubs and sold the rest,” says LeBlanc, “Wrestling Nova Scotia had let us know about a year before the Canada Games that those were being sold, pretty much brand new, for $10,000.”
“We hosted the high school provincials in March and did some pretty robust business with a canteen we ran for that. We did some other fundraisers, and we applied and received a grant from Sport Nova Scotia as well and were able to get enough money together to cover the cost of the mats and the shipping.”
The grant was part of Sport Nova Scotia’s Sport Fund and is available to local clubs purchasing equipment that will help enhance their programming. The new mats are about seven or eight pieces and are much easter to set up and put away.
“It’s been a huge asset for our club,” LeBlanc adds. “We got them in August and used that as a recruiting tool for our fall sessions. They’re much bigger, lighter and safer than the old mats.”
“Wrestling is known as a fringe sport, but it provides opportunities for athletes who don’t always fall into the borders of traditional sports. It’s not for everybody, but for the ones who do stick with it, it really provides a benefit as they get older and into the middle school and high school programs.”
LeBlanc says the club has implemented a kids program for ages 9-11 to serve as a feeder system for its junior high and high school clubs, where athletes learn the basics of the sport in a non-competitive, fun-to-play environment. It began two years ago with six members and has since more than doubled in size.
But the Yarmouth Wrestling Club is not the only club in Nova Scotia that recently got new mats. With the support of Sport Fund the Antigonish Wrestling Club also purchased a set from the Canada Games and the Valley Wrestling Club purchased new mats for its 4-18 age program.
