Canada's Sports Hall of Fame casts a wide net, but does so smartly and well

Canada's Sports Hall of Fame announced its 2016 class of inductees today, with seven new names set to join the 604 members in November's induction ceremonies. While seven may seem like a lot for a hall of fame, that's actually lower than the 12 members inducted last year or the eight inductees in 2014. That, combined with the wide-ranging backgrounds of the inductees (including Pinball Clemons, an American who became a CFL star and famed coach, Bryan Trottier, a Canadian who found incredible NHL success in the U.S. with the New York Islanders and Pittsburgh Penguins, Sue Holloway, the only Canadian to represent the country in the Summer and Winter Olympics in the same year (1976), and Frank Hayden, a University of Toronto researcher who helped pave the way for the Special Olympics), illustrates just how committed the Hall is to trying to represent the wide breadth of the Canadian sports experience.

That approach makes perfect sense from a financial standpoint, given the challenges facing sports halls of fame across Canada and given the competition the Hall faces from sport-specific, province-specific and even city-specific halls of fame. A challenge with increasing inductions is not watering down the quality of a hall, but these selections have also been consistently impressive from a quality standpoint. While finding ways to represent the diversity of the Canadian sports landscape while not lowering the standards for induction can be a tough line to walk, the Hall seems to be doing it well here.

Judging cross-sport contributions is always incredibly difficult, as we see in the annual debates over awards like the Lou Marsh Trophy (for Canada's athlete of the year). It's the same thing with Canada's Sports Hall of Fame; Clemons, Holloway, and Hayden might as well be from different sporting planets, and it's tough to compare their contributions directly. All of them (and the other candidates selected) appear to be very deserving, though, each making massive contributions to Canada's sporting landscape, and that's a credit to the Hall's selection committee. The makeup of that committee, and the process it goes by, is perhaps a big part of why this Hall gets it right. Here's a list of who's on it:

Bruce Kidd, Chair

Michelle Cameron Coulter

Dr. M. Ann Hall

Dr. Colin Howell

Marion Lay

Kerrin Lee-Gartner

Roy MacGregor

Monty Mosher

Chantal Petitclerc

Scott Russell

Donna Spencer

Mark Tewksbury

Marie-José Turcotte

That's an impressive list of academics (Hall, Howell), journalists (MacGregor, Mosher, Russell, Spencer, Turcotte), athletes (Cameron-Coulter, Petitclerc, Tewksbury), and those who fall into multiple categories (Kidd and Lay are both academics and former athletes, Lee-Gartner and Lay both have experience in athletics and the media, Petitclerc's a former athlete who's now a senator, Tewksbury, Lay and others have worked with organizations such as the Canadian Olympic Committee and Sport Canada, etc). It's also a list that has coast-to-coast representation, representation from both genders and from different racial backgrounds, and one that includes a wide variety of perspectives. For such a broad-based hall, trying to present the whole history and breadth of Canadian sport, this kind of panel is incredibly important. The involvement of the public also matters; the Hall welcomes nominations for their panel to consider, and they're very transparent with their process and criteria, which is outlined here (PDF). That has a lot to do with why this seems to be working out decently.

It's also worth pointing out that the Canada Sports Hall of Fame itself seems to have come a long way in the last few years. For much of the Hall's history since its 1947 beginnings, it was based in Toronto and shared a building with the Hockey Hall of Fame, but the hockey hall left in 1993, and the Canadian sports hall took a downturn as a result. It eventually lost its long-term building as part of the construction of BMO Field, but rather than give up, it held a national competition to see what city would want to host the hall. Calgary won out of nine bidders, and the Hall now has a dedicated 40,000-square-foot building at the Canada Olympic Park there that's won numerous awards. It's also found ways to engage sports fans across the country, including interactive exhibits that put you into Olympic sports, a Sport Heroes Celebration and golf tournament with new inductees at the Calgary hall in June, great online information about the various members of the hall, a variety of educational programs throughout the year, and the induction ceremony in Toronto November 1 (which will be televised live on Sportsnet, and will feature The Barenaked Ladies). There are a lot of challenges out there for a hall of fame simply devoted to Canadian sport, and this hall has faced many of them over the years, but it seems to be doing a lot of things well now and finding ways to get Canadians involved with it, excited about its inductees and eager to visit it. That's good to see.