Lauralyn Radford

Lauralyn Radford is an educator, organizer and sports administrator. She has been instrumental in attracting major athletic competitions to Red Deer, including the 2019 Canada Winter Games. Her advocacy for sports has contributed to many improvements in the city’s infrastructure and injected millions into the local economy.

Lauralyn “Lyn” Radford was born in Edmonton on January 20, 1956. She remembers her parents as hard workers with a strong sense of social responsibility. “Volunteering kept my mother busy and meeting people after my father died,” she says. “She was the Brownie leader of our local community league, and my father coached my softball team. Being a mechanic, my dad would fix single ladies’ cars and would only charge them for the parts. So, I definitely had role models when it came to caring for the community.”

Her mother was Métis and raised her daughters to value that important aspect of their heritage. She took them on pilgrimages to Lac Ste. Anne and made sure they spent quality time with their great-grandmother. She was a very protective parent: Lyn recalls her mother forbidding her from riding her bike on the sidewalk until she was 12 years old and discouraging her from playing team sports for fear of falling prey to bad influences among her teammates. Nevertheless, Lyn continued to be drawn to the athletic world. Her father had been good friends with NHL goalie Glenn Hall, a relationship she says first clued her in that one could build a lifelong career in sports.

When she enrolled at the University of Alberta to pursue a degree in Education, Lyn became the first person in her family and her mother’s circle of friends to attend university. In 1978, she married Reg Radford. Together, the couple ran businesses in Bonnyville and Rocky Mountain House before settling in Red Deer in 1986. There, Lyn taught middle-school physical education and social studies and served on the boards of various recreation centres.

Lyn was an active volunteer with local organizations, including her daughter’s gymnastics club, where the facilities were sorely lacking. “Probably the key moment in my life was arriving to pick up my daughter from gymnastics one day,” she says. “It was 20 or 25 below. I drove up, and here the kids were standing outside in the parking lot. To hit the equipment at the proper speed, they had to use the lot as their runway and start tumbling at the doorway. And I thought, ‘This is ludicrous. What are we doing here?’”

She proposed a scheme to a dubious City Hall whereby the City would commit to building a proper dedicated gymnastics centre, while the gymnastics club would pledge to pay them back a $1 million loan over the next 15 years. “I also told them I wanted the place built on a particular location, between 2 high schools,” she says. “They laughed about that, too. But 3 years later, in 2000, we had a facility – the Collicutt Centre. About 6 years ago, the club paid off their debt, and now they own that gymnasium rent-free.”

Lyn had helped organize several athletic events in town – the Labatt Brier in 1994, the World Junior Hockey Championship in 1995, the Alberta Winter Games in 1998 – and had sat on the boards of the Red Deer Ski Club, the Red Deer Gymnastic Club and the Red Deer Titans Track Club. But following her triumph with the Collicutt Centre, she was now seen as someone who could play a leadership role in Red Deer’s economic development. “Hosting games is a big economic builder,” says Lyn, who chaired the bid committees for the 2003 Alberta Senior Games and the 2007 Western Canada Games. In 2004, Lyn chaired the committee that delivered the 2006 Alberta Summer Games – another success story.

Lyn attributes her success to her ability to get the entire Red Deer community excited by these events, not just the hardcore sports fans. “You’ve got to say, ‘this makes the whole community better if we do it.’”

When she joined the Board of Governors at Red Deer College in 2008, she again found herself within an organization she felt was ready to ascend to the next level. “I would always try to push the board to think bigger about what our community college could be. It had long been a dream of mine that eventually our community would have a postsecondary institution that could issue degrees so that people wouldn’t have to leave the community to get their education. And now it's a Polytechnic University, and it's issuing degrees.”

In 2014, Lyn embarked on her most ambitious project yet in heading up the committee to make Red Deer the host site for the 2019 Canada Winter Games. The City had tendered an unsuccessful bid for the 1995 Games, but Lyn felt it had since come a long way. The odds were against them, though. They were not the only Alberta contenders – Lethbridge had their eye on the Games, and Calgary was considering a bid as well. And while it had been the site of the 2012 Scotties Tournament of Hearts women’s curling championships, Red Deer lacked a strong history of hosting major athletics competitions.

Any doubts the Canada Games selection team might have had were more than outweighed by the volume of street-level enthusiasm Lyn’s team mustered. “On the day the evaluation committee came to town,” she says, “we closed the downtown streets and City Hall Park and filled it with people. Everybody had to wear a red T-shirt. We came down the street with the bid evaluation committee, and when we turned the corner, they saw a solid three blocks full of Red Deer people all wearing red T-shirts.”

Lyn made sure that excitement carried on after they won their bid. They fundraised an astonishing $14.5 million toward the event – over $4 million more than the estimate in their bid package. In the short term, Red Deer’s economy got a significant boost from the 3,600 athletes and more than 125,000 visitors and residents who attended the Games. But Lyn says the long-term effects have been even more impressive. These included not only improved infrastructure – such as the Gary W. Harris Canada Games Centre – and a greater ability to attract other major events to the city, but also valuable experience for the young people who staffed the Games and then remained in Red Deer, becoming community leaders and CEOs.

Lyn has lent her organizational and leadership abilities to many other causes over her lifetime, transforming Red Deer in the process. She helped raise millions for several nonprofit organizations, including Ronald McDonald House, and she chaired the Red Deer Chamber Homelessness Taskforce and founded the Homeless Foundation for Red Deer Region.

She has served on the board of directors for almost every Red Deer sports organization one can think of, including the Alberta Sport Development Centre, the Red Deer Gymnastics Club, the Red Deer Titans Track Club, the Red Deer Figure Skating Club and the Red Deer Ski Club. On a wider front, she served on the boards of Alberta Sport Connection and Speedskating Canada, and she currently serves on the boards of the Alberta Sport Leadership Association and the Canada Games Council.

Among many other recognitions, Lyn received an Alberta Centennial Medal (2005), a Senate 150 Year Special Citizen Award, a Women of Excellence Lifetime Achievement Award, the Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee Medal (2012), the Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee Medal (Alberta) (2022), the King Charles III Coronation Medal (2024) and an Honorary Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies Degree from Red Deer College (now Red Deer Polytechnic). She was the 2009 Red Deer Citizen of the Year, and in 2023, she became a rare non-athlete to be inducted into the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame.

Lyn continues to live with Reg in Red Deer. She is the mother of four and grandmother of 11. And she continues to advocate passionately for the value of sports.

“Sports unites the community,” she says. “At these games, you see the sports people work with the culture people, who work with the social justice people, who work with our civil servants or with the corporate world. Everybody's together. It's the whole community.”