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RECIPIENT – Dan Poelman presented Joyce Caley with a copy of Yukon Sport on a recent trip to Dawson City. Caley, a lifelong resident of Dawson, was interviewed for the book. Photo by Dan Poelman

Sport Yukon searching for territory’s sport stalwarts

A tome detailing Yukon’s sporting history is now available for free to members of the public.

By Marissa Tiel on July 27, 2017

A tome detailing Yukon’s sporting history is now available for free to members of the public.

Yukon Sport by John Firth, was published in 2014 with support from Sport Yukon.

The 352-page hardcover encyclopedia covers decades of sport history in the territory.

Firth interviewed hundreds of people for the book, which also utilizes photographs to detail the territory’s colourful sport history.

“We knew we weren’t going to make a lot of money on this book,” said Tracey Bilsky, Sport Yukon’s executive director.

“We were just investing in preserving history.”

Sport Yukon recently received 500 copies of the book from the publisher.

A group of dedicated summer students has been hard at work trying to locate everyone who was interviewed for the book or who is pictured in order to supply them with a complimentary copy.

The group, including Katie Vowk, Jetta and Maren Bilsky, Peyton Twardochleb, Paige Poelman, Liam Russell and Sasha Masson has been using a variety of avenues to track people down.

They started off at the beginning of the summer with a giant list of names, sorted by sport and have been whittling it down for three hours a day Monday through Friday.

The students are all athletes and most of them are competing at the Canada Summer Games in August.

The hardest part, said Vowk, has been finding contact information for people.

“Sometimes I’ll find them and find articles on them, but there’s no number, no email,” she said during a work session this week. “I’m like, ‘God, this is frustrating.’”

But all the hours logged are worth it when the students are able to deliver the book to someone, especially if they didn’t know they were featured.

Some of the voices featured in the book have passed.

“I think it was interesting for them to see all these trail blazers and in building Yukon sport and what all these people brought,” said Bilsky. “That’s actually one of the main reasons we did this book, was because we were starting to lose them.”

The project is on hold now for a couple of weeks as the students compete at the Canada Summer Games in Winnipeg, but when they return, they’ll be pounding the pavement to deliver the copies.

Sport Yukon is offering free copies of the book to anyone who is interested.

“Now that it’s packaged so well, we want to make sure we get it out there,” said Bilsky. “We want to open it up to anyone, literally anyone who wants a piece of this history can feel free to pop in or call us. We just don’t want the books sitting there.”

Comments (2)

Up 0 Down 0

Sandy Jamesen on Aug 7, 2017 at 5:07 pm

May I receive one please. Thank you! Sandy Jamesen 1200 Golden Circle Unit 101 Golden Colorado 80401

Up 1 Down 0

Ron MCFADYEN on Aug 7, 2017 at 12:27 am

Hi I spoke to John for his historic book
May a copy be made available please
Ron McFadyen
1923 Drummond
Concession 4C
Perth Ontario
K7H 3C8
CBC-CKRW now retired after 47 years in Yukon
Cheers

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