Largest-ever Team Nunavut mobilizes for Canada Summer Games

With just days until competitions are scheduled to begin, Team Nunavut is already breaking records at the 2025 Canada Summer Games.

In all, the territory is sending 72 athletes to compete in basketball, wrestling, indoor volleyball and beach volleyball.

With another 46 Team Nunavut members participating as coaches, managers, youth ambassadors and mission staff, the territory’s contingent is the largest yet to represent the territory at the Games, which are set to take place in St. John’s, N.L., from Aug. 8 to 25.

“We’re coming down to the crunch now,” said Jeff Seeteenak, chef de mission for Team Nunavut. “I can’t think of a better atmosphere to be a part of.”

Team Nunavut men’s and women’s beach volleyball teams are already in the host city to train. With two members each, those squads may be the smallest teams competing at the Games, but they are ready to make a big impact, said men’s coach Rob Tomyn.

Team Nunavut’s Eekeeluak Avalak, in yellow, wrestles Zubin Gatta, of Ontario, in the Canada Summer Games men’s wrestling semifinals at the 2022 Games in Ontario’s Niagara region. Avalak went on to win Nunavut’s only gold medal to date. (Photo by Denis Cahill, special to Nunatsiaq News)

“I’m very excited with this group of athletes,” said Tomyn, now in his third year as a Team Nunavut coach.

“They’re focused and determined, and in shape and ready to go. If we were going to the Canada Games tomorrow, I’d be OK with that.”

Meanwhile, the Nunavut men’s and women’s basketball teams are ready to make their first ever appearance at the Games. The sport accounts for 30 members of Nunavut’s record-setting delegation, with 12 players each on the men’s and women’s teams, plus coaches and managers.

Team Nunavut’s wrestling team is the largest yet assembled for that sport. With 10 athletes each on the women’s and men’s sides, accompanied by five coaches and managers, the team is more than twice the size of the wrestling delegation that went to the 2022 Canada Summer Games.

It was that wrestling team that earned a gold medal at the 2022 Summer Games in Ontario’s Niagara region, when Eekeeluak Avalak of Cambridge Bay won first place in the 52-kilogram weight class.

Nunavut captured its first-ever medal in judo at the 2007 Winter Games in Whitehorse, won by Eugene Dederick of Iqaluit in the 100-kilogram weight class.

Held every two years alternating between winter and summer sports, the Canada Games represent the largest amateur multi-sport event in the country, featuring more than 5,000 athletes, coaches and managers.

Team Nunavut joined the Canada Games in 2001, two years after the territory was formed.

Competitions involving Nunavut’s athletes will be broadcast live, according to the Team Nunavut website. The viewing link has yet to be shared by organizers, Seeteenak said.

Nunavik is not sending its own contingent to the Games, said Arnaud Francioni, communications and marketing co-ordinator with Athletisme Quebec.

“To our knowledge, no athlete from the 14 communities of Nunavik is currently part of the Quebec team for the 2025 Canada Summer Games,” he said, speaking in French.

With files from Dominique Gené