EDMONTON - A former Macoun resident is one of nine women from across the country selected for the second edition of the CFL's Women in Football program, presented by KPMG.
Shaylee Foord is the Edmonton Elks' representative for this year's initiative. Each CFL club will welcome one additional woman to join its football operations department for a few weeks, including training camp, from May 14 to June 3. Foord will be working in the Elks' football operations department.
She was excited to be selected, and is looking forward to spending every day on the field for a month, as she called it "her favourite place to be".
"The Elks were looking for an operations assistant," Foord said in an interview with the Mercury. "I travelled last year with our U18 girls' provincial team to Regina as the general manager, so I think that experience was a big help."
Foord said she will get to be involved with meetings and helping out with various aspects of the team. She can also sit in on coaching sessions if she wants to learn more about that aspect of the team.
This won't be Foord's first experience in football. In addition to her work with Alberta's U18 female team, in which she was also the equipment manager, Foord had been a player with the Edmonton Storm female football team since 2019. She is a receiver and a defensive back.
Through the Storm, she became involved with officiating in the city for the past two seasons. She started to work as an official after the Storm's season was cancelled in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. There was a little bit of minor football still happening in the city that year.
"I actually tried officiating because it was the closest I could get to a field for a year, and I found that actually a lot of the things that I love about officiating are the same things I like about playing," said Foord. "It's the teamwork, it's having your own job to focus on and your own things to focus on."
She enjoys the interactions with the coaches and the players on the field. It's a great social atmosphere, Foord said, and it forces her to be certain about the calls she makes and confident in what she knows.
Through connections she made in officiating, she has also started coaching, especially in flag football.
She will also be travelling with the U18 female team to nationals in Ottawa this year.
Foord didn't play football until moving to Edmonton. She was a teenager when minor football returned to the Energy City. High school football came back to the Estevan Comprehensive School in her Grade 9 year, but she didn't try out because she didn't think about playing, as she'd never seen girls play.
"I wonder if there'd been a girls' program, or if I'd seen girls on the team, if it would have changed my mind," said Foord.
She'd never seen a female football team play until watching the Storm.
Estevan now has a female football team, the Estevan Kinette Club U18 Viragos, and female athletes have been part of many local youth football teams.
And while football is now such a huge part of her life, it wasn't a passion when she was younger like it is now. She did go to some Saskatchewan Roughrider football games.
"It's really meant a lot in the past couple of years to meet a lot of women who are working in football, and playing and coaching and doing that kind of stuff," she said.
She attended a conference in Ontario in March for women in football, and she said it was "really, really cool" to see women who have come to the game from different pathways.
"I've always seen myself hopefully in those roles someday," she said.
The CFL says the participants will gain knowledge and practical experience working in professional football as they continue their journeys with the game. In addition, KPMG will offer participants additional business-related mentorship.
Two participants from the program's first cohort last year were hired full-time with their clubs, including Elisha Torraville with the Elks as manager of football operations. Foord said she will be working closely with Torraville.
