Yellow Fly pulls on passion, experience to encourage girls in sports

Trudy Yellow Fly certainly has a passion for sports.
And the 34-year-old Blackfoot, who is a member of the Siksika First Nation, is thrilled her job enables her to pass on that love and encourage as many others to be active.
Since 2009, Yellow Fly has worked as a sport development co-ordinator for the Indigenous Sports Council of Alberta. This position sees her performing a number of tasks dealing with people throughout the province.

Her responsibilities include forging community partnerships in Aboriginal communities in the hopes of establishing various sports programs. She is also in charge of coaching development which helps run these programs.

Yellow Fly recently ran the Building On Our Strengths workshops in Calgary.  These workshops, held over a pair of days, attracted about 25 participants.

The goal of these workshops was to find ways to improve community sport and physical activity for Aboriginal girls and women. This was accomplished by bringing together women who are working or volunteering in sport, recreation, health and education fields to discuss their experiences.

By sharing ideas and listening to what others are doing, the plan was to also inspire others into developing their leadership skills which can be utilized in their own communities.

“I’ve had some good feedback as a result of the workshops,” Yellow Fly said.

In fact, she already knows of one Aboriginal running club that started up.

“That’s a positive result of the workshop,” she said.
Though no dates have been announced, Yellow Fly is hoping other similar workshops are staged in the near future.

“I’d love to do more of that,” she said.

Yellow Fly would love to see more Aboriginal girls playing sports at a higher calibre than some of them are currently at.

“There are a lot of (Aboriginal) girls that play a lot of sports,” she said. “There’s a lot of girls who are playing on high school teams. But they don’t have that support to go to elite teams.”

Over the years Yellow Fly has also volunteered as a coach with various basketball, volleyball and running teams. She has been an assistant basketball coach on and off at Siksika high school since she was 20.

“I’ve always had a passion working with youth,” she said, adding during her high school and university days she held various jobs at the Calgary’s YMCA as well as the city’s youth wellness centre.

While she was growing up Yellow Fly was also a star basketball player. She has represented Alberta numerous times at the North American Indigenous Games.

Her first experience came at the 1993 NAIG in Prince Albert. She also played on provincial youth teams in both the ’95 and ’97 championships.

Then at the 2000 NAIG in Winnipeg, she played once again, but this time in the adult division. She also played in the adult grouping at the ’06 games.

That was followed by Yellow Fly’s first coaching experience at NAIG, where she guided an Alberta midget girls’ squad at the 2008 games in Cowichan, B.C.