Adam Prudhomme
Beaver Sports
Cameron Brown will be travelling to sunny Florida this December, but he has no plans to hit the beach.
Instead, the Grade 10 NDSS student will be working hard on his football game as he suits up for Team Canada at the Pop Warner International Super Bowl, Dec. 1-10 at the ESPN Worldwide Sports Complex in Orlando.
He was one of 40 high school aged athletes selected by Team Canada after a successful tryout in Burlington earlier this year.
Brown got his start in football at the age of seven and worked his way up to the Kingston Grenadiers and last fall completed his rookie season with the NDSS Golden Hawks.
“It definitely helped,” Brown said of getting an early start in the sport. “(The tryouts) were a lot more intense than anything I’d ever played before. I went through two minor leagues then to the high school, then Ontario and now Team Canada.”
Despite the tropical climes, Brown expects his visit will revolve around football with little time for anything else.
“We’ll be there for 10 days and we’re guaranteed three games,” he said. “We’ll have a few practice days and there’s a big chunk of hotel that everyone (visiting for the Pop Warner International Super Bowl) will be in and it’ll basically be hotel and field.”
As a lineman, Brown says the coaching staff has told him he could be asked to play on either side of the ball. That should give him plenty of game experience as he looks to learn as much as he can during his rare opportunity. He has proven to be a standout both as a defensive tackle and at centre when on offense. He hopes his experience with Team Canada will be a stepping stone to eventually making a career out of football down the road.
“I’m mostly looking to know where I’ve gotten to and where my skill is,” Brown says of matching up against some of the top high school athletes from across the world.
“It’ll be a lot different than up here,” Brown says of the football-centric culture that is Florida. “We have the grass fields and all that. Down there almost all the fields are turf, a lot more people are into the game.”
To help offset his travel costs he’s set up a GoFundMe page at www.gofundme.com/floridaboundfootball. He’s appealing to the community to help him raise $4,500.
In the meantime he’ll continue to train with the Golden Hawks as he gets set for his second KASSAA season, which will get underway in September.