McMaster Community Sports Leagues

Levels of Play

We offer both Open Leagues and Coed Sports Leagues.Apart from our Open leagues, our Coed leagues specify gender-based roster requirements, including a minimum number of women or men. There’s some value to this system, but it also falsely perpetuates the idea of gender as a binary and presents other barriers to our building an inclusive sport community.
For the purposes of our program, the terms 'men' and 'women' are inclusive of trans, gender-fluid, and agender members of our community. We've trained our staff to understand gender as a spectrum and encourage participants to take part in the programs that best represents their gender as THEY identify

In a Coed league, sport specific rules dictate gender-based roster requirements for each team (usually equal numbers of women and men).
Participants must identify as either women or men (even if only for the purposes of Sports) and each team must satisfy the minimum roster requirements during gameplay.
A separate set of rule modifications may apply to specific Coed leagues.

Some things are true of all our community sports leagues and tournaments:

Players and staff respect each other to create a safe and fun-first experience.
Competition is part of it, but not the whole thing; being active, together, is most important. Our leagues are run by members of the McMaster community, remember your connection to every other member within our community as you play.
Respect, safety and fun-first. It's not an accident this is in here twice. If you ever find yourself losing sight of this, take a deep breath: this is an active living outlet and we're here to socialize and have fun!
All our leagues are Recreational Play.

In our Recreational leagues, players range in skill level from beginners just learning the game to experts who have played for years. These players are also known as your 'friends.'
Regardless of ability or experience, players on both teams look out for each other: You may try hard, but your skills and experience never come at the expense of another player's, lesser skilled or otherwise. Likewise, you may be brand new to a sport and not know all - or any! - of the rules.
Overly-aggressive and competitive play has no place in our Recreational leagues, and, if you're the more skilled or experienced player, you don't aggressively steal, spike, etc. against lesser skilled players.
Quite simply: You play, together, for fun, as friends would. Includes regular game play and elimination playoffs.