Nike Canada has inked to a five-year sponsorship deal
with the Canadian Hockey Association (CHA) to promote the
game and develop the hockey skills of Canadian youths. The
partnership's skills development program includes Nike's
donation of 5,000 coaching manuals to the CHA's 2,500 minor
hockey associations; 10 two-day skills development hockey
camps in major cities and regions across Canada between
January and March '98, and "high performance" camps for male
and female players in Calgary, beginning this summer (Nike).
In Toronto, Beverley Smith reports that Nike's "seven-figure
deal" with the CHA makes it a premier sponsor of the CHA's
"more than 500,000 registered players." Smith adds the deal
comes as the CHA "is still smarting" from its upset loss to
the U.S. in last year's World Cup of Hockey. CHA President
Murray Costello: "We heard a bit about that along the way.
We needed to pay more attention to development. It's not so
much what we haven't done, but what the other countries, 53
of them, have done" (Toronto GLOBE & MAIL, 10/16).
