A Team of Their Own
Britt Traynor can feel excitement heightening as she makes her way through the Annapolis Valley. Training camps for teams in the new Eastern Canadian Basketball League, including the Valley Vipers, will begin in early March with the regular season slated to tip off late in the month.
“People in the Valley are really excited, and to be honest, they say it’s very hard to believe we are going to have a professional basketball team,” Traynor says. “Basketball has a long and rich history in the Valley, but we never would have dreamed that we would have our own pro team.”
Traynor, a 36 year-old resident of Kings County, Nova Scotia is the manager of business and basketball operations for the Vipers. She’s also the Manager of Community Development for the Municipality of the County of Kings.
“From the perspective of my day job, it’s very exciting to see this high quality of sports entertainment come to the Valley,” Traynor says. “There is going to be economic development and spin-off from having this in our community,” she notes. “As a basketball fan, it’s going to be a lot of fun for the Valley to be part of something as great as this.”
Traynor attended King’s-Edgehill in Windsor, Canada’s oldest private school, where she “was pretty much a bench-warmer,” but she loved the game. When she returned to the Valley, she worked closely with Tim Kendrick, who is now the president of the Eastern Canadian Basketball League. She was the team manager for a pair of Kendrick-coached teams that competed at the 2007 World Youth Basketball Championships in Hawaii.
The teams, with rosters largely comprised of players from the Annapolis Valley, won bronze and silver. Instead of medals, they were presented with surf boards. Traynor expects residents for the Valley – from Digby to Wolfville – to support the Vipers, who will play their home games in Berwick at the Kings County Mutual Centre or, as locals call it, The Apple Dome.
“There are a lot of people talking about it so I have no doubt that we’re going to be successful,” she says.
Anyone interested in tickets or becoming a corporate sponsor can contact her at: britt.traynor@ecbl.ca.
In 1984, Papa Johns Pizza started in the small town of Jeffersonville, Indiana, and its popularity has spread all the way to Atlantic Canada. Today, Papa Johns boasts over 3,600 restaurants and can be found in more than 35 international markets outside of the USA. In Atlantic Canada, we opened our first Papa Johns franchise in Moncton, operating under the name of PJ Atlantic Restaurants Ltd. in 2009.
This was the first of many Papa Johns restaurants to be opening over the next few years to serve the Maritime provinces. We now have a dozen restaurants in the following areas:
639 Mountain Rd., Moncton
555 Dieppe Blvd., Dieppe
20 Plaza Ave., Saint John
528 Smythe St., Fredericton
133 McAllister Dr. Saint John
19 Babineau Ave., Charlottetown
1909 Mountain Rd., Moncton
269 Main St., Fredericton
94 Hampton Rd., Rothesay
540 Pinewood Rd., Riverview
961 Bedford Highway, Bedford
644 Portland St., Dartmouth
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