Beyond Football: A look into the only Public School Football Program in the City

Griffins Football

“It’s not about football. It’s about helping people find their best potential,” says Griffins Football Head Coach Mr. Bobby Gibson, reflecting back on the district-unique program he founded nearly 12 years ago.

Gibson, who had grown up in Saskatoon, was surprised to learn after moving West that the sport he loved didn’t have much of a place on the fields of Vancouver’s public secondary schools. After landing a full-time position with Eric Hamber’s Physical Education Department, Gibson set out to change that.

“I said to myself, once I get into a school and into a PE department, I want to try and make [football] happen,” Gibson told The Province a dozen years ago back when the program was just getting started. Famed BC sports reporter Howard Tsumara, who interviewed Gibson for The Province, described the initiation of Hamber’s Griffins football team as “biggest start-up project in all of high school sports.”

In the latter half of the 2010s, the Griffins transformed from a junior varsity start-up to a Tier II BC Championship-winning, letter-of-intent-signing, university-recognized name in the world of secondary sports.

Ishaan Gaur, who graduated in 2021, played for the Griffins throughout his high school career, and said the program “played a large role in [his] growth as a student-athlete and person.” Gaur, who has continued to play football for Simon Fraser University, shared his favourite memory of the program “winning a championship in 2017 while playing in BC place,” adding that it was a “surreal” experience.

Playing 10 seasons, the COVID-19 Pandemic’s onset in early 2020 brought the team to a halt, and they haven’t been able to get back on the field since. During the fall, Gibson ran a three-days a week informal football program with a few students. “It was actually pretty remarkable that they knew that they would probably never actually get to go to another school to play or practice or anytime,” Gibson shared in admiration, adding that the tight group of four was “out regularly” for eight weeks.

Joshua Klimek (12), one of the four students who trained this past fall, told The Nest “the program was a great opportunity to meet new people, improve my overall athletic ability, and discipline.”

Throughout the Griffins 12 years, the program has faced persistent challenges, both on and off the field.

“The single biggest challenge that we have had and continue to have is people playing,” Gibson said.

Gibson explained that while there are always students who want to play, “there’s a lot of concern around football,” which he understands. “I think that we take the head-injury topic a lot more seriously than a lot of other places, and a lot of other sports, but that’s probably the single biggest thing that keeps people away. Parents will say ‘nope, my kid’s not allowed to play football.”

“I always find it interesting because [parents] will say [a student will have] had five concussions playing soccer, and I ask ‘Are you still playing soccer?’,” to which Gibson says the answer is usually yes, but football is still off the table for most.

“[Our] biggest challenge is 100 per cent getting kids out to play,” Gibson reiterated, and added that although he gets around 5 to 10 emails a year from parents and students outside Hamber’s catchment asking if they can transfer to play for the Griffins, they aren’t able to admit students due to the District’s cross-boundary application restrictions. Gibson says that an exemption or alternation to cross-boundary policy would help the program.

However, finding players isn’t the only challenge the program has faced.

“Funding has been difficult at times,” Gibson expressed, saying that both Hamber’s PAC and Athletics Department have stepped up in times of need and been supportive. The program is financially independent from the school, as the Athletic Department doesn’t get enough funding to support a football team, Gibson explained. And between players, managers, coaches, and other staff with the team, Gibson says around 50 students were involved in the program pre-COVID. 

“It costs a lot of money to run a program, and way more now than [when we started]. It used to [cost] $300 for a bus and $150 for a helmet, now busses are $700 and helmets are $800. But every step along the way, we’ve [gotten] lucky. There have been people that have come to coach, and they [had] a connection, and we needed new jerseys, and they talk to somebody, and they got us jerseys.”

Gibson said in previous years, whenever the program faced financial hurdles, they simply persevered and made it work. “My attitude all along is that ‘you know what, it’s gonna work out, if we plug away it’ll happen,’ and up until last season it carried us through.”

With that said, Gibson notes that Hamber’s wide variety of curricular and extracurricular activities make the football program one of many offering students must choose from and that while other schools may have football as the one and only robust program, he appreciates the diversity and wouldn’t change that, even if it gathered more players. 

“We run soccer, we run volleyball. we run cross country, we run so many things, and I would never want to see us take anything away just to try and get a couple of extra players,” Gibson said. “Some of those things that could help [increase participation], I wouldn’t even want them to happen anyway.”

Gibson is hopeful that the team will be able to return to games in the fall of the 2022/2023 school year, but says at the end of the day, his goal for every player is that “when they come through our program, they learn a lot about themselves and that when they leave, they are ready to be the best possible version themselves. And if we win a football game or two along the way, that’s great.