For Camosun Chargers alumni, the chance to reconnect with old teammates and classmates is coming this September in the form of a golf tournament, banquet, and games held at Highland Pacific Golf Course.
This will be the second annual Chargers Golf Tournament fundraiser, with alumni activities happening on Friday, September 22 and Saturday, September 23. Camosun manager of athletics and student life Scot Cuachon believes it’s important to host annual events like this to maintain a sense of community with alumni.
“Myself and a few members of our Camosun staff here, including the late Gord Inglis [see News Briefs, page 3], got it launched off,” says Cuachon. “It was something that we’ve always wanted to get going because we knew that there was quite a bit of interest from the community and from our alumni. And, yeah, it’s something we’ve always wanted to get going just to help with community building, raise our profile, and if there’s some funds raised at the end of it that would be great, too.”
Cuachon says that the tournament will feature more activities than just golf—it includes a social event that provides an opportunity for alumni to mingle.
“So, the tournament takes place starting at 4, and then once the tournament’s over we have a social at the end of it, and there are also tickets for just the social as well in case people are not into golf, which some people are, I’m not a great golfer myself,” says Cuachon. “So we sell social tickets at a reduced price just to give people an opportunity to come and reconnect and re-engage with the Chargers, with their former teammates, with their former instructors, with their former supporters, and things of that nature. We’re going to have a silent auction as well.”
The alumni festivities continue the following day where alumni teams will face off against the current Chargers teams at the Pacific Institute for Sports Education at Interurban campus. Anyone is welcome to come and watch the games; the entry fee is by donation.
“This year, and years ahead, we wanted to just make it a whole festive thing,” he says. “On Saturday we will have all four games, all four teams, so, men’s [and] women’s volleyball and men’s [and] women’s basketball will be playing kind of back to back to back to back against the current teams. Usually it’s a really, really fun time just to get the past re-engaged with the present and kind of let the current athletes know these former students and student-athletes who really kind of paved the way for them. So that’s the whole idea with the weekend. We launch it with more of a social activity on the Friday, being the golf tournament and the social afterward, and then for those who can still play we get them playing against the current teams on the Saturday. It’s usually quite a bit of fun and we’re really looking forward to having it again this year.”
An overarching theme of the alumni weekend is reconnection, something that hasn’t always been focused on in past years, but Cuachon believes that events like this will help to change that.
“A lot of the feedback we’ve gotten from alumni is that they don’t get those opportunities very often, to reconnect with everybody, not just members of their team but, you know, members of the other programs,” he says. “And within our planning of it all, we realized that there was a bit of a gap in previous years of not providing these opportunities for all these wonderful people who’ve come through our programs and represented us just supremely. There was a gap in them not having the opportunity to reconnect with the school, again, to reconnect with their experience, and reconnect with the people that they were around.”
Tickets for the tournament are currently available at Eventbrite, starting at $75.88.