Smokers attending Kitchener Minor Girls Softball games will now have to butt out. Earlier this year, the league adopted a smoke-free policy which bans spectators from smoking along the fringes of the playing field. And anti-smoking youth groups working for the Waterloo Regional Health Unit hope this will be the first of many sports organizations to embrace this policy.

"We just want to create a smoke-free environment for the kids and set an example for the rest of the community," said Jackie Davison, vice-president of the Kitchener Minor Girls Softball Association.


Last year, Davison said the association received a number of complaints from coaches and players about people smoking too close to the game. While provincial laws prohibit smoking on school properties, the problem arose at games at city parks where some of the parents sitting on lawn chairs directly behind the players would light up, she said. The regional bylaw banning smoking only applies to the stands in the parks, Davison said. "I thought at that time that something should be done for the kids," she said. The solution, Davison said, was the region's tobacco-free sports and recreation campaign spearheaded by two local youth groups funded by the province to promote anti-smoking behaviour. The groups, Toxik out of Kitchener-Waterloo, and Y-Act out of Cambridge, first introduced this campaign at a soccer tournament last July in Cambridge and interest has been growing, said Marie Green, regional supervisor of these youth groups.

Davison said parents were told about this voluntary smoking policy at softball registration and there have been no complaints about the rule since the season started earlier this month. The association has over 500 players. "We have had overwhelming support for this," she said. "Even the parents at registration said it is about time we did this." Enforcement of this rule involves coaches telling smokers about the policy and asking them to either butt out or leave the playing field, she said. Portable signs saying it is a tobacco-free event will soon be posted at the games, she said. "We are not asking people to quit smoking. We are just asking them to provide a tobacco-free environment for these kids."

Green said besides outdoor activities like baseball and soccer, the youth groups will also be targeting indoor sports like hockey, where chewing tobacco by players in change rooms is common.

"We are approaching as many teams as possible throughout Cambridge and Kitchener-Waterloo to convince them to adopt this policy," she said. Sofia Reive, a Grade 12 student at Sir John A. Macdonald Secondary School in Waterloo and a member of Toxik, said smokeless tobacco is popular with students and school teams. "I have seen students use it in the library. Using chew and spitting it into water bottles," Reive said. She said students are more receptive to hearing anti-smoking messages from their peers, than from adults.

"The message we want to get out is tobacco doesn't mix with sports," Reive said. "If nothing else we are trying to make social change."