With the 2010 Ontario Senior Games-Actifest ready to visit the
sports-mad city of Oshawa this August, the Games could not have a
better organizing chair than Bill Allen.
In Allen, the Actifest committee has a boss who has played a big role in local athletics for decades.
A long-time volunteer with a myriad of Oshawa athletic groups, Allen, 73, is a retired high-school geography teacher who was heavily involved in organizing a now-thriving Oshawa high-school hockey league. No surprise, Allen is past chair of the Oshawa Ice Advisory Council – a post he held for 25 years.
“I brought all of the local leagues together,” explains Allen of what he says was previously a “mishmash” prior to the early-1970s, says Allen.
The 2010 Ontario Senior Games-Actifest is counting on Allen’s leadership skills to help jump-start sponsorship for an event that will see more than 1,200 visitors including top 55-plus senior competitors, coaches, officials, spectators and VIPs from across Ontario descend upon Oshawa from Aug. 10-12. In total, the province’s best senior athletes will compete in 17 sanctioned events, all the while providing living proof of the Games’ slogan, “Achieving through Active Living.”
Forever Young is playing an active role with Actifest 2010 as a media sponsor of the event and will be posting schedules and results from the 40 district games this spring on its website, foreveryoungnews.com.
“We have a very active city,” says Allen. “We are very competitive, very developed, very organized. Oshawa is an excellent choice for Actifest.”
There is a cost attached to this worthwhile endeavour. Allen says his committee must raise about $110,000 in order to operate Actifest as it deserves. Thus, initial efforts from the Games organization rest in promotions and sponsorship.
Allen’s leadership also led to his involvement with the Oshawa Sports Hall of Fame as well as with the Ontario Summer Games 2000. He has also coached soccer and hockey, and therefore realizes what the spirit of sport is all about: competing to the best of one’s ability.
Early in 2010, Allen will ensure convenors are assigned to all Games venues, in addition to securing sponsorship. He’s proud of Oshawa’s facilities, including the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT), which will house athletes, offer six sports venues and provide a hub of activity as an athletes village.
“We have between 6,000 and 7,000 actual residences in our Oshawa senior-citizen centres – that’s number one in Ontario,” says Allen of Oshawa’s large seniors population.
