Where's the love for Team Canada?

FANTASTIC , thanks for posting this. :thup:

Somebody else said that this would have gotten more coverage if had been hockey, essentially comparing the difference between how the media covers hockey and how it covers football. To compare how well the media covers both, I think it makes sense to compare similar events for the respective sports. The closest thing in hockey to the IFAF U19 is the WJHC, so that’s why I chose that as the point of comparison.

There was a time when the hockey event would have gotten as much coverage the football one does now. Whether or not you consider either event to be old or new (I don’t think that can be defined precisely), the hockey one has been around a lot longer, and that additional time has enabled them to turn the event from something that nobody aside from the participants cared about, not even the Canadian sports media, to the spectacle that it is now. That increases the likelihood that it’s going to get noticed. So I think the bigger reason that the media pays more attention to the hockey event than it did for the football one is that the hockey event itself is a bigger spectacle. Hockey homerism probably is a factor, but I just don’t think it’s the biggest one.

Of course, I would like it if the media did pay more attention. I’m just not going to hold it against them (yet) that they didn’t.

I feel like I might have given the impression that I was criticizing the IFAF U19 for being small. I wasn’t. In fact, I think as far as the popularity of international junior sports championships go, the WJHC is the odd one out (as is Canada for paying so much attention to it).

Also, the TiCats posted this on their facebook page today

Trouble was the Nike sponsored "The Opening" event was running at the same time so that got most of the recruiting attention in the States.

This is much better than the old Junior Super Bowl events that they used to run as they only drew high school players from that State for the American team. This was a mix from all over that had tried out at several warm up events. For the record this year's event was originally supposed to be run in 2011 but they bumped it back to make it a World Championship style event that is going to run every 4 years from here on in.

Because of the 4 year splits this event won't be the equivalent of the World Junior Hockey tournament. Last one was 2009 and the next one is scheduled (for right now...) for 2016.