It's exciting news for local kids who are looking to get into football.
The Sarnia Junior Football Association has officially been launched, to serve youth aged eight to 19.
President Jay Arns said the goal is to provide the best opportunity for the athletes to grow. They'll be bringing in some high level athletes to help with training camps.
"At the same time, as a not-for-profit group, we're able to reduce costs and make things more inclusive for anybody," said Arns. "We want to make it accessible for everybody wishing to play football at any level. Coming up, we do have some camps that we're going to be announcing. We'll start running them indoors until such time we can get outdoors on the fields."
Arns said it's an all encompassing development organization.
"We're going to be providing pathways for all athletes with better opportunities for play within our city and recruitment outside of our city eventually," he said. "The club is going to include flag football, touch football, and female football teams. They're going to be really competitive teams, hopefully."
Arns said the goal is for the main tackle team to join a competitive Ontario league in the fall, but details are still being finalized.
"There's a lot of history of football in Sarnia, dating way back to a couple of championships and a pretty deep, rich history," he said. "We're going to bring back, in our tackle division team side of things, the Golden Bears. They'll be competing in various levels from U10, which is eight, nine and 10-year-olds, all the way up to U18 which actually goes into 19-year-olds."
The Golden Bears were active from 1956 to 1961.
The team won Ontario Rugby Football Union (ORFU) championships in 1958 and 1959.
