North Winnipeg Nomads football team and others searching for gridiron home

The North Winnipeg Nomads are fundraising for needed repairs to their field after it was deemed unsafe. Jeff Keele explains.

The North Winnipeg Nomads football teams are living up to their name, as they have no home field.

11-year-old Daxton plays for the Nomads. His mom Jasmine Gauthier said they love watching him play at the Nomads field off McPhillips St.

“It’s great, I like it here, my brother played here so there’s a family aspect, so when he said he was joining football I was like I know where you’re going,” Gauthier said.

“We’re going to look into Nomads, make sure that we’re in their catchment.”

But this year Daxton and his teammates won’t be able to catch footballs there.

“It’s hard, it does suck, going to a different area for games and calling that home games,” Gauthier said.

Club President Rodney Sankar tells CTV News they did work on the field to get it ready for the season, but noticed there were some mistakes.

Sankar said they tried to fix it themselves but they couldn’t get it right. He said portions of the field are uneven, and after an assessment, it was deemed unsafe for kids.

“If you take a walk on it you can feel that your feet are unstable because there’s some lower spots and that’s a risk for kids slipping, tripping, ankle twists which can lead obviously to bigger injuries,” Sankar said.

The Nomads five youth and young adult teams have been displaced and are playing temporarily at Frank Whyte Park on Fife St.

This also means high school games had to be moved too.

The Nomads are calling on the community, businesses and governments to help raise the estimated $600,000 to fix the grass field.

Sankar said while it would be fantastic to get the upgrades done in time for the 2027, it’s not yet known if that will happen.

“The long term would be to rebuild the field for longevity,” Sankar said.

Winnipeg High School Football League commissioner Jeffrey Bannon is raising the prospect of artificial turf. He tells CTV News, Manitoba has underfunded turf fields for years.

“Then if you look at geographic locations of outdoor turf fields, how many are in the north for Football?” Bannon said on Friday.

Mynarski councillor Ross Eadie seems to agree.

“I think they should go for the artificial turf because even at $600,000 to restore the grass and make it up to spec, it’s not going to be ready this year,” Eadie said.

Jasmine Gauthier believes they need to fix the grass now and save up for turf down the road.

“Ideally I would love to see it have turf but I realize that that’s probably not going to happen in the next two years and I’d like to play at home,” Gauthier said.