WORKLIFE | SPORTBIZ
Explosive Edge SHARPENING THE SKILLS OF AIRDRIE’S YOUTH STORY BY JOSIE RANDALL | PHOTO BY SERGEI BELSKI
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t’s been more than a decade since Chris and Kim Bergman opened the doors of Explosive Edge. They had dreams of creating a space in Airdrie where athletes of all kinds would walk in and go “woah, this is where I need to be.” Since then, the sports development training complex has had close to 10,000 athletes come through its doors, including Canadian professional ice hockey forward Ty Rattie and goaltender Aaron Dell for off-season training. “Airdrie has a huge hockey population, and there’s a lack of hockey-specific training available to them. So we felt the need to create a kind of a premier hockey development agency,” Chris says. “We also felt the city needed more of a focused approach for youth sports. My wife and I are both elementary-stream teachers, so we can help athletes learn those foundational skills. Teaching sport at such a young age really does need experienced introduction and energy.”
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S U M M E R 2022
DOUBLE WHAMMY Explosive Edge trains athletes as young as two, all the way up to adults. They primarily train hockey, but have programs for baseball, lacrosse, tennis, golf and skating. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Chris says, they were expanding so rapidly they were moving into a new facility and opening up a batting cage. “We were shut down for quite a while. We were in a unique circumstance in which we were not only the fitness sector, but we were also the arena and recreation sector. We were kind of hit with a double whammy,” Chris says. “We had to be fluid with whatever scenario the government put us in. There were times when that building was empty and it was quite a lonely place, [given] it was designed for kids to come and play.” Chris says they adapted by introducing one-on-one training, and changing team programming into development programming because of capacity limitations.
