Article on this event from The Straight.
http://www.straight.com/node/132913/print
B.C. Lions honour amateur-football heroes at the Orange Helmet Awards
By Jeff Paterson
Publish Date: February 21, 2008
When Bobby Ackles returned to the B.C. Lions in 2002 after 16 years working in football hotbeds like Miami, Dallas, and Philadelphia, he noted a decline in interest not only in professional football but in the game as a whole at all levels throughout the province.
Sensing something had to be done to promote the sport he loved, and knowing full well that the Lions needed future generations of fans, Ackles was driven to action and the Orange Helmet Awards were born. On March 1, the Lions will host the fifth annual Orange Helmet Awards banquet honouring the best and brightest in amateur football throughout the province.
“It started after I was here for the first year, and I felt there should be something in the off-season or the nonfootball season where there should be some football,” Ackles told the Straight in a telephone interview. “So I…discussed the possibility of a fundraiser for amateur football in the province which would also celebrate football in B.C. It was something I felt was needed, because most sports have a celebration of what their teams and coaches and the people who support it have done over the year.”
What started in 2004 as a gathering of just under 400 at a hotel not far from the Lions’ Surrey training facility has grown up in a hurry. The event has gone both upscale and downtown to the point where this year more than 900 people will pay $200 apiece to fill the convention hall at the Westin Bayshore Resort and Marina to celebrate all that is good about the sport they love.
The growth of the Orange Helmet Awards has exceeded Ackles’s expectations for the event, which has become one of the big nights on the local sports calendar. Although the Lions president and CEO isn’t sure how much bigger the dinner itself can get, Ackles envisions making the awards banquet the centrepiece of an annual B.C. football convention.
“The first year there was a coaching clinic put on, and the first 100 coaches could get a deal on the clinic and the dinner ticket,” he said. “But the clinic didn’t survive, because it seemed that the dinner was around spring break and that’s when a lot of the coaches get away, so we weren’t having a lot of success with that. Somewhere down the road, I’d like to see us bring back the clinic and have it all encompassed so that all levels of football have their annual meetings at the same time the weekend of the dinner.”
Although it’s organized by this province’s professional football team, the night places the emphasis on football’s grassroots, celebrating the individuals and teams who play community, high school, junior, and university football throughout B.C. All money raised from the event is split equally and returned to those groups to help grow the game. The Orange Helmet Awards are presented to teams and players who have performed well during the year, not only on the field but also in the community and in the classroom.
No big sports banquet would be complete without a headliner, and that’s where Bobby Ackles’s many contacts in the football world come in handy. In past years, the Lions have landed former National Football League greats Warren Moon, Joe Theismann, and Rocky Blier as keynote speakers. This year, they’ve opted for well-known ESPN broadcaster Chris Berman.
Ackles realizes that apart from former Toronto Argonauts player and coach Michael “Pinball” Clemons a few years back, the featured speakers have come from south of the border. It’s something Ackles has tried to address, but he said his hands are tied because there’s a lack of big Canadian names suited to speak at an event like this one.
“What we’ve tried to do is have people who have a bit of a background in the Canadian Football League or Canadian football [Moon and Theismann both played in the CFL, and Berman is terrific about dropping CFL references into his U.S. broadcasts],” Ackles noted. “It’s unfortunate that we don’t have more Canadian athletes who do the dinner circuit. I thought about Don Cherry, but he’s not really for a football crowd.”
So this year, former CFLer turned broadcaster Glen Suitor of TSN will MC and Berman will deliver the keynote address. When they, and Ackles, look out into the crowd that night, they’ll see players, parents, coaches, trainers, officials, and administrators who share a love of football and who all help the game to thrive in this province.
Although Ackles and his staff have worked hard to build the Lions into a model franchise and consistent contender, the real rebuilding in football has taken place in public parks and on high-school fields throughout B.C.
“It seems to me from talking to the guys at the grassroots level that football at all levels is extremely healthy,” Ackles said. “I look at the number of high-school programs and I think there are around 65 senior and junior programs in the province, whereas when I left here in 1986 there were about 23 programs in the province and most of them were in the Lower Mainland. Vancouver Island now has good high-school programs and it has a couple of junior programs, and it didn’t have any junior football at all when I left. We have two university teams in B.C., and there are all kinds of kids at the lower levels, so it’s really grown in the last 10 to 15 years.
“It makes me feel pretty good,” he added, knowing his hard work has played a hand in that growth.
As at all awards dinners, there will be winners—but at the Orange Helmet banquet, there will be no losers.
