Speakers
Description
The Opeongo Heritage Cup is an annual Hockey Tournament in Barry’s Bay, a rural town in Eastern Ontario. Organizers have styled the event as a Multicultural Community Hockey Event, where teams of various ethnic identities (i.e., Algonquin, German, Kashubian, and Irish) compete. The event symbolically engages a variety of heritage and cultural elements through both the structured sport and participatory (i.e., spectator) elements. We used an intrinsic case study to explore how ideas of heritage and community were articulated, constructed, and contested through this event. Data were collected through participant observation as well as semi-structured interviews with ten community members who were involved in various capacities. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006; 2012). Results highlighted the ways the event (1) constructed both historical-settler and contemporary-regional identities, (2) constructed flexible ideas of cultural and regional pride which evolved and adapted over time, and (3) served as an important platform for both inter-generational and inter-group relationship building. The results demonstrate the ways that heritage, community, culture, and competition are interwoven, constructed, and contested in the context of participatory community sport events. The results contribute to the literature on heritage sport events (Pinson, 2017; Ramshaw, 2019) by engaging participatory and performative elements of sport experiences. Further, we offer insight into ideas of heritage and multiculturalism in rural Canada. In this way, we argue that sport events offer a unique platform through which to examine rural communities and the implications of broader social and cultural change (Mair, 2006; Rich, 2021).
