It's the final week of the ParticipACTION Community Challenge and Hay River is still at the top of the national standings.
As of Tuesday morning, the town sat first as it continued its flip-flopping of top spot with Red Deer, Alta. Monday was a perfect example of that as Hay River began the day in the lead, only to have Red Deer leapfrog them, only to have Hay River end the day atop the leaderboard after it leapfrogged right back.
Hay River is also tops in the NWT with Fort Good Hope in second (before the community had to be evacuated due to the fire) and Paulatuk in third. Yellowknife was in sixth place as of Tuesday morning.
Courtney Fraser, the town's recreation programmer, said the big added result came courtesy of the NWT Track and Field Championships earlier this month, but other groups have been making sure to stat on top of what they're doing.
"Activities from the 16 businesses taking part in the Hay River Corporate Activity Challenge were tracked last week," she said. "The Party in the Park, organized by the Town of Hay River Department of Recreation, finally took placeafter two cancellations) and the large crowd that attended was tracked. Local area schools have been catching up on tracking their gym classes and recesses and sports groups, such as Hay River Slo-Pitch, the Hay River Swim Team and Hay River Minor Ball, and community groups such as the Hay River Youth Centre have been consistently tracking.
Add it all up, added Fraser, and Hay River has a total of 53 organizations registered for the challenge, which she said was a huge amount for a community of its size.
While groups are tracking their own activity to go toward the town's total, Fraser said she's not able to see exactly what's going on at all, meaning it's the groups which are responsible for making sure they're tracking all of their eligible activities.
"I'm not able to see how many individual people from Hay River have registered for the challenge, I'm only able to view the number of organizations who have registered," she said. "I am also not able to see how many activities have been tracked by organizations in Hay River."
Everything will come to an end on June 30 and Fraser said there are some final events planned to spruce up the town's numbers.
"Playground Pop-Up for day homes, day cares and stay at home parents of young children, a community-wide water fight to celebrate the end of the school year and an event called Chalk the Walk to celebrate the end of the challenge," she said. "We'll also be contacting all community groups, sports groups and businesses registered for the challenge to encourage them to track all activity before the June 30 deadline and will continue encouraging community members to sign up for the challenge up until the final day."
Once the challenge comes to an end, it then comes time to convince the folks at ParticipACTION that Hay River is worthy of being called Canada's most active community and win the $100,000 grand prize on offer. Even if they aren't successful in that regard, there's still a very strong likelihood that the town could be named the NWT"s most active community and win $15,000.
Any money that is won would go toward improving recreation programming or standards in a community.