Craig Hunt

New Canaan Flag Football Season To Open Next Month with COVID-Related Changes

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Officials with a fast-growing youth sport in New Canaan say they’re preparing to launch the fall season next month under a number of rules related to the COVID-19 public health emergency. 

New Canaan Flag Football will require masks of its players and reduce the size of both rosters and on-field teams, so the sport will be 5-on-5 this year rather than 7-on-7, according to town resident Craig Hunt, a senior official in the Recreation Department-sponsored program. “Let’s get kids out there on the field—safety first,” Hunt told NewCanaanite.com. 

“I am excited to get it going,” he said. “I am also a little nervous because New Canaan becomes a very transient community as far as vacation-goers go. If you went to North Carolina, did you quarantine your son or daughter before we start this league? Those are the concerns and I think it’s very important.

Around Town

Did You Hear … ?

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Congratulations to the Pauley family on the birth of baby girl Peyton Ann Elaine Joyner. The daughter of Michael Joyner and Lauren Pauley—and granddaughter of recently retired New Canaan Tree Warden Bruce Pauley and his wife, Elaine—Peyton was born at 10:04 p.m. on July 14 at Norwalk Hospital. Lauren Pauley is a 2000 Trinity Catholic High School graduate. The Joyner family resides in Stamford. ***

New Canaan High School 2015 graduate and football standout Zach Allen will wear No.

News

New Canaan Flag Football League Sees Dramatic Rise in Popularity among Local Youth

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Every Saturday morning throughout the fall, New Canaanites should expect to see the Water Tower field packed with young boys and girls huddling up, running plays, tossing the pigskin and otherwise competing against each other in a full-on version of the nation’s most popular sport—but this is not tackle football, it’s flag football. Since the start of the co-ed Recreational New Canaan Flag Football League (NCFFL) in 2005, the program has rapidly expanded and—thanks in part to a popular week-long preseason camp in August—welcomes kids from 2nd through 8th grade to participate. When children are young, some parents worry about their kids playing tackle football for fear that they will get hurt, officials in the program say. Flag football gives kids the opportunity to learn and develop their techniques in the sport that they love, with not as much worry about concussions or other injuries. “It got started because Phil Davis, who is a good friend of mine—we are going back almost 10 years,” Craig Hunt said, who has been involved with the program in 2008.

Animal 411

Family Dog Alerts New Canaan Man to Black Bear on Rear Porch Late Saturday

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A Marvin Ridge Road man is crediting his 7-year-old rescued pit bull with scaring off an estimated 250-pound black bear that had made its way onto a screened-in porch out back of the house Saturday night. Craig Hunt said he was watching the end of the Michigan State-Duke game (a disappointing one for Hunt, a Spartans fan with several relatives who have attended the East Lansing, Mich. school) when he heard a loud noise from beyond the kitchen. “I was thinking a tree fell,” Hunt said hours after the incident. Opening the kitchen door to a darkened screened-in porch where he’d been grilling earlier in the evening, Hunt sensed straightaway that something was amiss—and so did Buddy, a handsome pit bull he adopted about five years ago through Bully Breed Rescue of New Canaan.