A team of researchers from the University of Toronto are working to determine how last year's wildfires impacted the sports sector in the NWT, and how sports can be protected in the face of future disasters.

"We know that sports stopped [during the fires]," said Tracy Blake, one of three researchers working on the project. "That makes sense, but how people made the choice to stop, and when they made the choice to come back, and how it's all going to be different based on how sport impacts them and how sport shows up in their life, we want to make sure all of that is accounted for."

Blake and her collaborators, Madeleine Orr and Daniel Sailofsky, have been working on their project for several months, and recently began interviewing athletes, coaches, and sports organizations in Yellowknife, Hay River and Fort Smith in hopes of learning what affects the fires had on the games they love. 

"The plan is to be doing interviews through the rest of this year," she said. "In my mind, I'm thinking December or January I'll still be interviewing, then doing the analysis after that through the late winter into the spring."

Blake admitted it can sometimes be tricky to get people to agree to interviews for her research, but with the help of Sport North, she is off to a good start as it pertains to this project. 

"[Sport North] is helping us with connecting with other communities, connecting with other sport organizations, the territorial sport organizations, local sport organizations SA¹ú¼ÊÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½” they're absolutely helping with that," she said. "The insights have definitely been interesting so far."

While Blake concedes she and her colleagues are still in the "very early days" of their project, she hopes they will have most of their research and analysis completed by summer or fall. At that point, the research will be compiled into "a sort of a guidebook or a playbook" which will hopefully help the NWT's sports community respond better to future emergencies. 

"[The guidebook will include] thoughts from this community or that community about what worked and didn't work for them, what they did, how they did it, and how this can help other communities as well," she said. "Dr. Orr and Dr. Sailofsky are actually going to be coming up to the North, coming up to Yellowknife and the surrounding communities next summer or next fall, and the hope is to have a working draft that is ready that we can go to share with the communities first so that they can both see what we've been working on and also tell us if we're way off base with what we've been thinking, and have a chance to speak up and co-create this guidebook with us.

"That is hopefully going to be planned to be done by the summer and then have the final document wrapped up by next year around this time."