Dal Football Club wins Another Impact Award: Most Impactful Sports Society

Mar 28, 2024

3 min read

Our football club won its third Impact Award for Most Impactful Competitive Club Sports Society at Dalhousie since the Impact Awards began in 2012.

Our goal is to positively impact Dalhousie University and our community through the engagement of Dalhousie students, Alumni, and volunteers through our football program.

Our club engages 90 players (many of whom we have actively recruited to Dalhousie), 16 volunteer coaches, staff, 6 trainers, 12 student executives, and volunteers (a total of approximately 150 people).

We usually host 1,200 to 2,000 students, parents, Alumni, and community members at our home games at Wickwire Field, and our home game live stream reaches 1,500 to 2,500 viewers worldwide. Both of these events offer meaningful opportunities for local business sponsors to interact with the community and support a growing student athletic program.

Our Dalhousie Football Alumni Facebook page, which includes past players, coaches, trainers, and staff, has over 300 active members. Our Founders Club – many back-in-the-day (pre-1976) Dal football players has about 100 members.

This year, we strengthened our social media presence by promoting our games, recruitment efforts, and Homecoming. We have collaborated with Dalhousie’s DalStudentLife account on several posts, Wag Physio, Keep it Social, and King of Donair, bringing together our collective audiences and communities. We now have just under 5,000 followers and have received over 650,000 impressions across our platforms since September 2023, and we are starting to be monetized by Facebook for our content.

2023 Homecoming Football Game – we partnered with Dalhousie to host its first sanctioned, on-campus Homecoming event in years. We sought and landed NSLC’s “Keep it Social” as an appropriate Homecoming Game sponsor.

Student Executive Committee – we advertised and recruited 12 student executives to run the business side of our club. Most of these roles are filled with non-players, giving students the opportunity to be important members of our club without being football players. Besides marketing, game-day operations, and finance functions, this year, we created a new Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) function.

Our Head Trainer (Dal Physio Alum) trains up to 8 Dalhousie students (Physio, OT, Kinesiology, Rec Management) as on-field Trainers who volunteer each year.

Concussion Research conducted using data generated from our team’s state-of-the-art impact sensing helmets by one of our past players, Dr. Casey Jones, was used in the application that won a Canadian Institute of Health Research Grant of $887,400 over 5 years (Feb 1, 2023) for Dalhousie Medical School. Two of our past players who are graduates of Dal Medical School are involved in this research.

Our club engages other Dalhousie Clubs and Societies, including the Dalhousie Women in Sports Society and Dalhousie Commerce Society (recruitment of executives and volunteers) as well as the Dalhousie Choir, Dal Cheer Club, and Dal Dance Club, who performed at our games. We also participate in “O” Week Dalympics on Wickwire Field every fall.

Our players created a fundraiser to support a teammate who was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer – 1Run2Grayson, which raised close to $7,000 for the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation. Besides individual player contributions, our Club donated $500, which was the 50/50 draw proceeds from our home opener.

Our club made a donation to the Canadian Diabetes Association in honour of a teammate from Ontario who tragically passed away in Howe Hall. Our team also purchased his 2022 AFL Championship ring and presented it to his family.

Our team supports Dalhousie University and the Dalhousie Student Union by purchasing travel food from Howe Hall Food Service, hosting our team events at the Grawood Lounge, and renting event space at the DSU building.