TIMMINS - A well-known teacher is retiring after 30 years of hoops and lessons.
Ted Weltz, who has been helping students develop teamwork, leadership, and basketball skills since he came to the city 30 years ago, recently announced that this will be his last year with the Elite Basketball Camp.
“The things I’ve learned as an athlete helped me in my profession, helped me in my life,” he said. “You need to be resilient, and you have to be strong enough to overcome these things and sports helped me with those situations.”
The camp started when Weltz moved to Timmins with his wife and noticed a need for the program at O’Gorman High School, where he was teaching.
“I played basketball my whole life, my kids play basketball now, so it’s just part of who I am,” said Weltz. “Our first year, we had maybe 30 to 35 kids. It started small.”
The program has grown and changed as the years went by.
“We did younger camps, older camps, we did high-performance camps, and we’ve done everything in between in the last 30 years,” he said.
Having run for three decades, athletes from the earlier years are now leaders in the community.
“Some of the coaches that coach in high school now came through the camp,” he said. “It’s come full circle and it’s nice to see the people that I coached give back to the community and give back to the sport.”
Seeing those former students and players come back and succeed in both basketball and their lives is a joyful thing, said Weltz.
“When kids come back and they’re done university or they’re in university, or they’re working, you see them in leagues, and we start talking about the good old days,” he said. “It’s nice to see some of the players that came through as youngsters come back as coaches.”
Weltz grew up in Val d’Or, Quebec, and played basketball for the University of Ottawa. He said the community and the support from families and sponsors that helped the camp keep going have been inspiring.
“It’s been an exciting time,” he said. “We’ve had coaches from all over the province come up and coach our elites camps. We’re very blessed to have gone this long.”
He said the importance of getting children involved in sports, or any activities can’t be undersold.
“I was a phys-ed teacher for the first part of my career and a principal for the last 20 years,” he said. “It has team building and determination and overcoming obstacles, communication, striving for goals, there are so many things that sport brings to people.’
He said the lessons he’s learned through coaching and playing also make people more resilient and better equipped to deal with life’s ups and downs.
"I think it carries over in your adult life when you become a parent or with your job, or just with life,” he said. “I think sport has a lot to bring to people and you can see in children when they play sports, they develop as a whole person and not only sport, it can be music, it can be drama.”
As he enters retirement, Weltz has set a very important goal for himself that is still basketball-related.
“My youngest daughter is still playing basketball, so I’m hoping to catch most of her games in her last year,” he said. “That is my goal.”
Registration for this year's Elite Basketball Camp is open. Grade 4-5 students are from June 26 to 30, and Grade 7 and up go from July 17 to 21. Registration is available online.