Dr. Rene Vandenboom started at Brock University in 2004 after being hired as faculty in the Departemnt of Kinesiology (Faculty Applied Health Sciences) having come from the Department of Physiology at the University of Michigan.
Vandenboom grew up in the Nobleton/Bolton area north of Toronto, but moved to the United States in 1996 to take a position at Harvard University.
Vandenboom’s hockey coaching career started in the 1980s with travel and house league youth hockey (Bolton, London, Kitchener) and gradually transitioned to coaching ball hockey while at Brock.
After arriving at Brock, he was added to the Team Canada coaching staff as Fitness Director which started a six-year run where he traveled overseas three times and worked with both the men’s and women’s senior national teams where he won two gold and two silver medals at the ISBHF World Championships.
Vandenboom started an informal ball hockey team called the ‘Brock Bombers’, which took Niagara leagues by storm as they went on to win a number of championships.
He was instrumental, alongside Adam White, in starting the ball hockey club team at Brock.
“Shortly after that I was contacted by the OBHF and asked if I would be willing to enter a team in a University Tournament they called the University Challenge,” said Vandenboom. “As far as I know this was the very first official inter-university ball hockey competition in Ontario.”
The Badgers won the first tournament in 2013, and again in 2014 when they didn’t give up a single goal.
Vandenboom and the Badgers won the first Ontario University Ball Hockey League championship in 2015-16 and proceeded to win it for three consecutive seasons.
