Women in Tricolour created on International Women’s Day

Queen’s Athletics to provide athletic financial awards for female students

Image supplied by: Journal File Photo

On March 8, Queen’s Athletics launched their Women in Tricolour initiative in honour of International Women’s Day.

The Women in Tricolour initiative aims to provide financial awards to female student-athletes to support them in their goals both on and off the field.

The awards will be given based on academic and athletic achievement and to athletes on either varsity clubs or teams. Students will be able to receive up to $4,500 in athletic financial awards (AFAs) from the Women in Tricolour initiative.

Due to the rigorous demands of their schedule, maintaining a part-time job isn’t an option for most student athletes. To offset this, AFAs aim to eliminate the challenges student athletes face while participating in interuniversity sport.

The development officer for the initiative, Jennifer Butchart, said the idea came from the growing need to fund female student-athletes across Canada. 

“Since many female sports began well after their male counterparts, they don’t have the same philanthropic funding base,” Butchart said. “To adhere to OUA and U Sports equity rules we need to increase funding for athletic awards for female athletes so that all of our teams will benefit.” 

In the video that announced the Women in Tricolour initiative, several athletes from different women’s sports teams here at Queen’s made statements about the “unprecedented success” these teams have begun to experience. The Women in Tricolour awards hopes to sustain these levels of success in the future. 

Since the beginning of this year, this success has been seen by Queen’s women’s teams throughout the 2017-2018 athletic season who have competed for OUA and U Sports Championships.

From a team perspective, the women’s cross country team won gold at OUAs and silver at the U Sports championships this year. On an individual level, Branna MacDougall won gold at OUAs and bronze at U Sports, while her teammate Claire Sumner won silver at both championships. 

Another individual medal performance was that of Louise Munro, who won silver at the Canadian Rowing University Championships (CRUC) in November.  Both the women’s rugby and hockey team finished second in the OUA this year, earning their spot at the U Sports National Championship. While the hockey team has yet to play, rugby finished in sixth.  

Butchart said these athletic successes are the type that the Women in Tricolour Initiative hopes to support in future years.

Tags

Initiative, Queen's Athletics

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