Jill Fast, who has been named the national coach for Canada’s U18 Indigenous women’s football team, with the St. Vital Mustangs Football Club on June 6.JOHN WOODS/COURTESY OF WINNIPEG FREE PRESS.
Growing up in Manitoba, there was almost no sport that Jill Fast didn’t try her hand at. Hockey, soccer, basketball, the list went on and on.
The one exception, however, was football.
That all changed at the age of 25, when someone sent an e-mail to her senior women’s hockey team asking if any of the players would like to swap skates for cleats and give football a go.
Fast didn’t need a second invitation.
“I would always get fouled out of basketball or, yellow cards in soccer, penalties in hockey,” she said. “[So I said], yes, this sounds like a great fit.”
Now 37, Fast has played football with distinction for more than a decade, representing both her province and Canada, and currently plays for the Manitoba Fearless of the Western Women’s Canadian Football League. Along that journey, she also got into coaching, working her way up to becoming the first female head coach in Winnipeg High School Football League history when she took over from former Blue Bomber Don Burrell at Portage Collegiate Institute.
This weekend, Fast will make more history as she takes charge of the first Indigenous under-18 women’s football team. The team will compete in an eight-team national championship in six-on-six tackle football, taking on teams from Alberta, Quebec, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, New Brunswick, and two squads from Ontario.
The championship, in its second year of existence, is taking place in Ottawa, beginning Sunday at Carleton University.
“To me, we’re all trailblazing,” says Fast, who is from the Métis Nation of Manitoba. “These young women that are going to be playing are also trailblazing for young women that are going to come up after them.
“So that’s huge, to collectively trailblaze and empower future generations, that’s what it’s all about.”
Going into 2023, Fast had originally wanted to take a year’s sabbatical from coaching, to focus solely on playing for the Fearless, for whom she plays linebacker.
But when Kevin Hart, president of Indigenous Football Canada, approached her earlier this year about the opportunity, she couldn’t say no, saying she was “honoured” to be asked.
Her appointment, and the participation of the Indigenous women’s team in the under-18 championship, is the culmination of a journey that began two years ago. That’s when Football Canada reached out to Hart, a member of the Manitoba Football Hall of Fame and former regional chief for the Assembly of First Nations, to form a diversity taskforce to explore how it could better connect Indigenous youth with the sport of football.
“We have, especially on the male side, relied on late adopters to the game,” says Jim Mullin, the president of Football Canada. “And we need to reach out to communities at a much younger age to get them engaged in the game, and I think with what the Indigenous Football Canada group is looking to do is ensuring that youth use athletics as a path so they have focus in their lives.”
That’s something that Hart himself admits could have made all the difference in his formative years. The Winnipegger, who is from the Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation, says he went down some dark roads before football helped mould him into the person he is today, ultimately playing for the Winnipeg Hawkeyes and later the Senior St. Vital Mustangs.
“Football changed my life,” he says. “I honestly thought that there would be no regional Chief Kevin Hart or Kevin Hart, per se, because, you know, I grew up in Winnipeg in the north end.
“I was a young guy that was homeless and involved with gangs, so football changed my life and turned it around.”
Alongside Indigenous Football Canada general manager Gordon Petruic, Hart has had a busy few months, recruiting players for the under-18 team from around the country, while trying to fundraise to cover the costs of transportation, accommodation and equipment. One of the ways the organization has tried to do that is through sales of its Colombian Fairtrade coffee.
“It’s unfortunate that we’re relying on selling $20 bags of coffee, to try and fundraise for something that’s going to cost well over $100,000,” he says.
Given Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s well-publicized aim of working toward reconciliation with the Indigenous peoples in this country, Hart was hoping for more action from the government on this front, particularly with the tournament taking place on unceded Anishinaabe Algonquin Territory in the nation’s capital.
“You would think in a nutshell that a new [national sports organization] such as Indigenous Football Canada, with its mandate to focus on the promotion, growth of the sport, but also to talk about all the social barriers that exist in First Nation, Métis and Inuit communities, that there would be funding available for this,” he says.
But finances notwithstanding, Hart says the mission for Indigenous Football Canada remains unchanged, and the players who are competing in Ottawa this week should help shine a light on the towns and villages that they represent. Hart describes some of the social problems that make newspaper headlines on an all-too-frequent basis, from missing women and children to the opioid crises that have blighted some of the towns across Canada.
“These are affecting some of the most impoverished communities and it’s unfortunate that a large segment of them are Indigenous communities, right?” he says. “So what I’m seeing here in football is an outlet for these boys and girls to learn a team sport, learn some leadership skills and get mentored at the same time.”
It’s a process, one that won’t begin or end with this weekend’s championship in Ottawa. But it’s a start, and when the Indigenous Team takes to the field to face one of the two Ontario teams on Sunday afternoon, wins and losses are set to take a back seat.
“I think empowering youth is my core, being there for the youth,” head coach Jill Fast says. “So results are second in that sense. It’s about the youth.”