While the school basketball season won’t be making a return until the tail end of 2018, Thompson athletes are already looking for any chance to get a leg up on the competition.
Prairie Elite Basketball Academy provided just such an opportunity by setting up a clinic at Wapanohk Community School Sept. 21−23.
Throughout the weekend, Prairie Elite co-founder JP Beauchemin ran a variety of student-athletes, Grades 5−12, through some drills and exercises that were designed to enhance their on-court ability and overall mental toughness.
“The kids have been working really hard,” Beauchemin told the Thompson Citizen on Saturday. “Most sessions have been around two hours or more, so they’re busting their butts in the gym and we’ve been working a lot on refining skills and now we’ve kind of moved on to working on decision-making.”
Beauchemin capped everything off with a structured game on Sunday, where these athletes were given the chance to take everything they’ve learned over the last few days and apply it to a competitive environment.
“I want them to learn by doing, not by me just telling them what to do,” he said. “Then we can talk about what went well and what didn’t go well so we can improve that way.”
Even though the past weekend’s events were made possible thanks to support from the Junior Bison Girls Basketball Club, Beauchemin said this clinic marked the first time Prairie Elite has travelled to the Hub of the North.
Alongside fellow instructor Victoria Zuke, Beauchemin founded Prairie Elite back in January 2018 as a means of providing more advanced training for female athletes in Manitoba who might not be getting the same opportunities as their male counterparts.
Beauchemin and Zuke have plenty of varied coaching experience between the two of them, having taught beginners and university-level athletes alike.
After running a number of basketball camps in Winnipeg under the Prairie Elite banner, Beauchemin and Zuke recently turned their attention towards smaller communities like Winkler and Thompson, since these students don’t have the same chances to develop and grow as athletes.
“We want to level the playing field and we want to enhance it,” said Beauchemin. “Because there’s a lot of female athletes that want to be pushed and want to get better, there’s just no where to get it and we’re just trying to fill that void any way we can.”
That being said, Prairie Elite did allow male athletes to take part during their recent visit to Thompson.
“Our main focus is always going to be to have the training for female athletes, but if we can squeeze in some times for the male athletes we’re going to do that as well,” he said. “As much as I talked about how there’s always training opportunities for males, the rural communities still face that same problem whether it’s male or female, where people just don’t come to them.”
Beauchemin also said he was very impressed with the general skill level on display in Thompson. This is especially true with some of the high school students who showed up to this clinic, since the R.D. Parker Collegiate senior girls’ basketball team has walked away with three provincial championships in the last four years.
“Some of these kids are pretty good at basketball,” he said. “They’ve had a ton of success and I think there’s actually a pretty strong basketball culture and community in Thompson.”
Beauchemin said that he and Zuke want to continue visiting Northern Manitoba communities in the future, using this most recent basketball clinic in Thompson as a guiding light for how to best implement their program.
“We definitely plan on coming back up here,” he said. “If I can come up here at least three to four times a year that would be great.”
The Junior Bison Girls Basketball Club would also like to thank Calm Air and the Days Inn and Suites for helping to make this clinic possible.
