Way More Than a Sports Team: Inside the Kingston Grenadiers

On a cool evening up at the field, just before the mosquitoes find you, four teams of kids are running drills under the eyes of coaches who all did a full day's work somewhere else first. Watch for a while and you start to notice the thing nobody puts on a roster. The Kingston Grenadiers are a football club, but football turns out to be almost the smallest thing happening here.

The scale sneaks up on you. The people who keep the Grenadiers running once added up their volunteer hours across a single season, and the total came to somewhere around 19,000. Spread across coaches, board members, trainers, and parents, that is the kind of number you would expect from a small business, not a youth football club.

Here is the catch. Almost none of them do this for a living. The staff work corrections, law enforcement, classrooms, and just about every other job you can think of, and then they come to the field. The Grenadiers run as a not-for-profit under a volunteer board, and the club has been at it since 2004, fielding four age groups today (a brand new U12 team of ten and eleven year olds joined this season, and the roster climbs all the way to U18).

What keeps that many busy adults coming back is the part that never shows up on a scoreboard. Ask anyone here what the club is actually for and you will get a version of the same answer. The football is the hook. The kids are the point. Scholarships, second families, young people who leave the program steadier than they arrived. Winning is welcome. It is just not the reason anyone is here.

Every family in the program signs up for more than games. They sign up to pitch in. The club asks each family for a volunteer commitment, backed by a $300 deposit, and here is the part that tells you who these people are. If a family does not end up putting in their hours, that deposit does not just disappear into club coffers. It goes into a fund that helps cover players whose families are stretched thin. Nobody gets cut from this team because money is tight.

That is the quiet engine of the place. Football opens a door, often the door to university that might not have opened any other way, and then the people who walk through it hold it open for the next kid coming up behind.

None of it came with a manual. She taught herself the social media side out of necessity, which she sums up with a shrug as simply the reality of running a not-for-profit. And she does all of it on top of a full-time job. She used to mention her eighty-hour weeks. These days, knowing how many hours her whole crew pours in, she has more or less stopped counting her own.

What comes through is not the workload. It is why she carries it. For Alexandra, this was never really about football. It is about what football makes possible for a kid. She has watched the program open the door to university for players who might not have found that door otherwise, including one very close to home. The wins are nice. The young people are the point.

The Dale Sands Memorial Game carries a name because the man behind it left a mark you can still feel around this club. Dale Sands coached the Grenadiers for more than a decade, but the people who knew him are quick to say "coach" only covers part of it. He was an arborist who ran his own business, a mentor, a husband, a father, and a grandfather, the kind of person his family says simply showed up for the people he loved.

His football life reached a long way. He played the game himself as a young man, then gave years back to it from the sidelines. You can find his fingerprints on high school teams, on the Grenadiers across the age groups, and on Queen's, where he joined the football staff in 2018. Players, coaches, and families all over the region crossed paths with him. He did not just belong to the football community here. He helped build it.

The reason a youth football club has a brain cancer cause woven through it starts with one person who saw a video.

That first leap became Grens Tackle Tumours, an annual partnership between the Grenadiers, the Kingston Brain Tumour Community, and the Brain Tumour Foundation of Canada. It has grown every year since. In 2025 the combined walk and Tackle Tumours team raised more than $32,000, finished as the top fundraising team, and earned what the Foundation calls a Cup of Hope.

At the heart of it is the SuperKid. Each year, a child who has come through a brain tumour runs the opening play of the memorial game and scores a touchdown, with the whole stadium on its feet. The first was Robbie Watson, who also co-designed the circular crest for the event. The next year the honour went to Walter Massett.

Stand at the edge of that field long enough and the math stops being about wins and losses. It is about a kid who found a path to university, a family that found a second family, a coach whose lessons outlived him, and a small army of volunteers who keep showing up for one another. The Grenadiers are genuinely good at football. But football was always the doorway, not the destination.

None of that is the work of any one person. It is the coaches, Dale Sands among them, who gave the program years and a name worth honouring every June. It is Alexandra and the crew who keep the whole thing running. It is the alumni who come back, the families who pitch in, and the kids like Jackson who remind everyone what it is all for. Way more than a sports team, just as advertised.

If you know a young person who might find their people here, or you just want to come cheer some on, the Grenadiers are easy to find at grensfootball.ca. New faces are always welcome, on the roster or in the stands.