The 2025/26 Ooks season is in the books. All the teams have packed up for the summer, so we sat down with Jordan Richey, NAIT’s Director of Athletics and Recreation to get some insight into how the department viewed this season and what they have in store for next season and beyond.
Answers have been edited for clarity and length.
Usually, there are few teams that have an underwhelming season, but over the past three years almost every team has had some sort of success. Do you think this success is perfect timing with lots of veteran players on each roster? Or is this something that will be more regular in the years to come?
Jordan Richey: I think this is the start of something special for NAIT athletics. With the successes the teams had in their first and second year, you knew it was going to get better. And what’s happened now as well is we have a tremendous amount of support from senior leadership. You see our president coming out to a nationals banquet and they’re showcasing that.
They have the utmost support for NAIT athletics, which is good. People see that, they want to be part of this. NAIT athletics has become a flagship program in the ACAC. Student athletes coming out of high school know about NAIT athletics because of the successes our teams have had. So, I don’t anticipate a regression. I don’t.
There might be a slight regression this year with the number of student athletes we had, but I still think we’re going to recruit top level student athletes to NAIT because of the experiences that our vets have just had.
We’re trending the right way for all these things. One of these years, we’re going to win all golds, which is going to be amazing.
Where do you think NAIT is viewed at the national and provincial stage after this season?
JR: I think we’re regarded as one of the flagship programs in the ACAC. And we should be. For the number of students we have, we’re one of the larger institutions in the ACAC. So, we do have a lot more students to draw from. So, we should always be up there.
At the national level, we have a lot of teams that did go to nationals. Not only always winning everything, but we had a men’s curling silver medal. We had a lot of badminton medals. Every badminton player that went to nationals from NAIT earned a medal, which was pretty special, including a national championship.
And when you start going to nationals, you start seeing the same top end programs. Vancouver Island University is always there.
Humber is always there from different conferences. And I think NAIT is now starting to be one of those programs that people expect to come out of the ACAC.
Another notable takeaway from this year was hosting the men’s volleyball national tournament. How did you feel that went and what the feedback was like from people around the country?
JR: The feedback’s been extremely positive. You never know how these things are going to go. I’ve been to a lot of them in my time. And that’s an awful lot of planning, an awful lot of work. You need buy-in from a lot of people. And I felt NAIT did that — they bought in. We had a lot of attendance from staff, students. We absolutely filled the place.
There wasn’t a spare space in the place. We had standing room only for that gold medal game.
And you just sit back and you say, “This is why we do it.”
This is what college sport is all about, to provide a meaningful student experience, especially at the top level going for a national championship. And I’m very proud of our NAIT staff and volunteers.
We had over 100 volunteers for this and it went off very well, but it’s exhausting. It’s very hard, long hours working the national championship. So, I really want to thank everybody for all the work they did.
The comments I’ve received is that this was one of the best nationals ever. So, when you get that kind of feedback, it kind of makes you feel, “Oh, that’s good.”
NAIT will also be hosting the men’s soccer nationals tournament in the fall. How is that process going?
JR: I think I kind of was joking with our staff the other day, like, “Hey, gotta flip that switch off and turn this switch on and let’s go.”
The good thing is, I think our team is in hosting mode. We kind of understand what it is.
There’s a lot of templates we can use from the volleyball nationals, a lot of successes that we can take from that. And even learning experiences of what we could have done better, we can now actually use that.
The challenging one for the men’s soccer is that it’s off-site, where we have to pivot and figure out how to bring the NAIT staff and students out to the Scottish Edmonton Soccer Dome to watch this and cheer on our teams.
So we’re going to figure that out. But a lot of the templates, the things that worked really well with men’s volleyball, we’re just going to rinse, repeat and do that for men’s soccer because we knew it provided students with a meaningful experience.
Is there any update on the soccer field and when that might be coming?
JR: Yeah, it’s not a positive update, but it is an update nonetheless. We are currently searching for a home for our soccer field and soccer teams for next year. We previously played games out in Sherwood Park, and because of the amount of teams that they have, we’re not going to be able to have that as our home.
Not ideal, but we have to spend some time doing that. It might increase the urgency of we need to bring the soccer field to campus here eventually, or a partnership.
We’re still hoping to have it. No talks have been made about an official field on campus. I know potentially Blatchford would be a good location, but we’re not there yet with a final plan. But we do have to find a home for our soccer fields, soccer teams.
When we sat down this time last year to recap things, you said if you were to sit down a year from then you’d be happy to see some improvement. With all the teams making the playoffs, a few more medals and championships, NAIT hosting the men’s volleyball national championships and every team maintaining their high GPAs, how would you say the program did on those goals?
JR: I do remember that interview. And I think on all three we actually hit home runs because we did get more medals than last year. Not only did we get more medals, we hosted an amazingly successful men’s volleyball championship.
And then our grade point averages, our fall GPA, we did not lose one student athlete to marks. That’s the first in my time at NAIT that we’ve never lost even one student athlete.
So, I think we’re trending the right way.
But how high can you go? I don’t know. I guess we can only try to keep it getting better, and I do feel that our department is getting better each and every year. I’m excited about next year.
If you’re gonna ask me that same question, “What do you want to accomplish?” it’d be very similar answers. We’d like to see more gold medals next year. We’d like to host the first-ever indoor national men’s soccer championship. That has never been done before. And we want people to say it’s a success. We should be hosting indoors in November all the time.
And then I’d like to see a high retention rate, because we’re going to have a lot of first year student athletes coming in with the number of graduating players we had this year. I want to see retention after that first year for our student athletes so we can start building another kind of dynasty.
Where do you see the future of the athletics program going? What’s the next goal you have set out to tackle?
We’re starting to excel in a lot of the sports, so where do we want to go here?
I think for myself, our stretch goals as a department is to start building alumni with all of our teams. Our men’s hockey alumni is very good, and we’ve got the framework on how it’s done. We just need to translate that to our other sports.
How do we connect? How do we pass that knowledge on to others down the road?
I’d love to start seeing a little bit more of an alumni for each and every one of our sports.
Featured image by Ana Kostyrko/The Nugget
