In September of 2022, Chad Celaire began the first Little Ballers program in Winnipeg Manitoba. Now it's coming to Weyburn.
Little Ballers is a program designed to teach transferable skills to children ten months (walking age) to eight years old.
Celaire explains the program covers various aspects of development.
“The younger you can start kids in sports is better because, there's so many benefits for kids playing in sports. For this program in particular, the kids are learning how to be social. They're learning how to, especially at younger years, they're learning to color match, they're learning numeracy, they're learning how their body moves. We're teaching them how to balance and the importance of stretching. So, we really combine a lot of things into one program.”
Celaire had come to Weyburn as a part of his job in youth ministry, now after starting Little Ballers, the community came back to mind.
“I think early childhood developmental stuff is not common in a lot of the smaller cities, but yet there's a lot of children. So, if the opportunity arose for a program to run there, we kind of felt like it would be it would probably be well attended. So, I just kind of kept that in the back of my mind. And then when I retired from youth ministry and started our little ballers program, I just decided that this would definitely be a town that I would want to bring the program to. I'm also good friends with some of the people that live in Weyburn, and they are big into basketball.”
The program runs with four different age groups, Baby Ballers aged ten months or walking to two and a half. Then Little Ballers aged two and a half to three and a half, Mini Ballers aged three and a half to five, and the oldest group is Big Ballers aged five to eight years old.
Celaire says the program coming to Weyburn is dependent on the interest shown in the free awareness classes. These classes will allow parents and kids to see what the program will be like before registering. It will be held on August 18th at the Weyburn Credit Union Spark Centre.
“We use basically the uptake, like how many people sign up, as a gauge for if we're going to go through it actually running the program.”
“So if we get a lot of people signed up that's going to make us say, yeah, well, let's run the program starting in September. So people do need to sign up and even if the classes are full, we want people to get on the wait list because sometimes if our classes fill up, we'll open up some extra slots for the free awareness time.”
You can register for the awareness session HERE.
If enough interest is garnered, the program will begin its fall semester on September 7th.