Younger sister Kenzie Girgis (left) has made the Canadian junior women’s outdoor field hockey team that will be travelling to Barbados in April for the PanAm Games, while big sister Abrie Girgis (right) is currently playing for Canada’s senior women’s indoor field hockey team which is in Pretoria, South Africa competing at the FIH Indoor World Cup. Photo by Hannes Girgis
Lorne Abugov
Back in April 2019, The Mainstreeter profiled three sets of identical twin sisters residing as neighbours on one city block in Old Ottawa East. The headline to that story read: Something in the water on Bower Street.
Now, a fourth set of Bower Street sisters – albeit not identical twins – are making headlines once again in these pages. Both Abrie Girgis (senior indoors) and her younger sister, Kenzie (U-21 outdoors) were named over the holidays to the Canadian women’s national field hockey teams, and both young women will represent Canada at the highest level of field hockey competition in worldclass events over the next few months.
Indeed, for Abrie, 25, her Team Canada international odyssey has already begun, as she is currently competing at the 2023 FIH Indoor World Cup, held every four years and taking place this year between February 5th and 11th in Pretoria, South Africa.
Her sister Kenzie, 18, is on a different
Team Canada trajectory, having survived gruelling tryouts to be added to the roster of the Canadian Women’s Junior Field Hockey Team that will be competing in the U-21 age bracket at the PanAm games in Barbados from April 10th to 18th.
Abrie’s Team Canada indoor team has been in South Africa since the start of February, and as this issue went to press, the team was off to a tremendous start, gaining a win and three ties in its first four World Cup round robin games.
Since indoor field hockey is not an Olympic sport (though outdoor field hockey is), the current Indoor World Cup is the most important event for the sport and for Abrie and her teammates. Team Canada’s Women’s Indoor National Team has attended the Indoor World Cup only twice before, finishing ninth in 2007 and 10th in 2015. Canada qualified for the South Africa World Cup by virtue of its recent success at the 2021 Pan American Indoor Championships, where the team earned a second-place finish in pool play before losing to the USA in the championship final.
Although a newcomer to Team Canada, Abrie got to meet and play with the team at a pre-World Cup tournament and tryout in Vienna, Austria at the beginning of January, where she showed well. “I hadn’t yet been selected for the Canadian World Cup team. They announced the team roster for the
Austria tournament and then, a couple of weeks later, they announced the official Team Canada roster for South Africa. The Austria tournament was my first time playing internationally, and I got to see other teams and other countries play field hockey. So it was a really great experience for me,” she told The Mainstreeter in late January prior to leaving for the World Cup.
The Girgis/Scoggan Family are a close-knit and supportive bunch who pride themselves on their active lifestyle. From left to right: Hannes, Kylie, Karver, Abrie, and Kenzie. Photo by Hannes Girgis
“I played four years of outdoor field hockey for the Queen’s University varsity team, and prior to that at Glebe Collegiate here in Ottawa. But this is indoor field hockey, and it’s a different game from outdoor, a much fasterpaced game, hosted in a gym and only
six players on each team instead of 11 players for the outdoor game,” says Abrie, who has a Life Sciences undergrad and recently completed her Master’s in Biomedical Engineering at UOttawa.
Team Canada made cuts following the Austria tournament, but Abrie survived the tryout and was thrilled to get the Team Canada invite. “The hockey in Austria was very fast with a lot of different concepts and systems of play that I wasn’t used to,” she explains. “But I was really happy with how I played in Austria. I got a lot of instruction from the coach, and he must have been happy with how I played since I got selected for the World Cup.”
Ditto for younger sister, Kenzie, who has impressed the Team Canada coaching staff across Canada.
A first-year student athlete at the University of British Columbia in the Engineering program, Kenzie explained how she got the good news from Team Canada. “I was in my dorm room. I had gotten an email from the head coach and then I saw my name on the team roster list and I got very excited. It wasn’t a total shock, but I wasn’t fully expecting it either. I really wasn’t sure.”
“The selection process actually started back in June of last year,” she recalls. “The national junior team had a tryout camp in Toronto, and a second one out in BC. A bunch of girls got to try out at each camp and from there they cut it down to about 21 players from the east and the same number from the west. Then in July, our group from the east went out west and we played east versus west training games, which led to more cuts and the selection of a team of about 24 girls to go to Mexico.”
In Mexico for 10 days, Kenzie got to play against the Mexican national team as well as some Mexican club teams. “It gave me the chance to meet all the other girls and play with them as well. And from that group of 24 players, 18 of us made the Pan Am team that competes in Barbados in April,” she explained.
Like her sister, Kenzie plays in the centre midfield position, but unlike Abrie, Kenzie’s international debut with the U-21 national team in April will be playing 11-aside outdoor field hockey, which is an Olympic event. So, is she thinking about competing for Canada in the upcoming Olympics in Paris in 2024? “Umm, 2024, that would be great. But that’s also very soon, and I’m still quite young. So if anything, I think 2028 in Los Angeles might be more realistic.”
Sisters Abrie and Kenzie put their backyard turf practice patch to good use during the COVID pandemic. Photo by Hannes Girgis
For now, Kenzie is playing outdoor field hockey in a Vancouver league before heading to train with Team Canada, following a successful rookie season on the UBC field hockey team and a selection to the Canada West all-star team. She helped her UBC team to a second-place finish in the Canada West conference behind the national champions. Her four years at Glebe Collegiate, where her sister Abrie helped coach her and her teammates, and on club teams with the Outaouais Field Hockey Club and the Gloucester Tigers Field Hockey Club, provided Kenzie with a solid base in field hockey.
But the 2024 Paris Olympics could entice older sister Abrie, although the Team Canada senior women’s outdoor national team is based in British Columbia. “There are a lot of strong athletes on that team, but there are quite a few who are retiring which leaves a couple of spots open. If there’s an opportunity, I would definitely be interested in playing for the outdoor national team. It’s definitely a possibility that I go out there and try out, though I’d probably have to move to Vancouver,” Abrie says, a prospect which prompted sister Kenzie to point out that “there’s lots of space in my dorm room at UBC!”
The girls have the strong support of their parents, Hannes Girgis, a Bank Street dentist and Kylie Scoggan, a scientist at Health Canada, as well as their brother, Karver, a finance graduate from UOttawa who is training to become an accountant. When he is not attending to the teeth of his patients, Hannes doubles as the unofficial photographer for the girls’ teams and both he and Karver laid artificial turf in their backyard during COVID times so that the sisters could have a place to practice their stickwork.
The close-knit family has been watching all of Abrie’s World Cup games from South Africa using a streaming video service, but they all plan to travel to Barbados in April to take in Kenzie’s games in person. “It was a very tough decision for us to make, not going to South Africa with Abrie, but we got notice about her making Team Canada and the World Cup only two weeks before she had to leave, and we just couldn’t pull everything together in such a short period of time,” laments Kylie. “But we did manage to get to Vienna to watch her in the Austria tournament, which was terrific, and we’re super excited to be going to Barbados to cheer on Kenzie.”
The costs of Kenzie’s participation on the Canadian women’s junior national team are largely self-funded, so she has started an Adopt-an-Athlete fundraising program to help her defray the costs of team fees, training camps, tours, and competitions. Anyone wishing to help Kenzie fulfill her dreams on Team Canada can do so at: https://www.canadahelps.org/en/charities/field-hockey-canada/p2p/adoptanathlete22-23/team/womens-next-gen-program/member/kenzie-girgis/
