Many young athletes find themselves standing at a fork in the road: work hard and train to get better at their chosen sports, or take the cheating road of performing-enhancing drugs.

“You’ll have to make choices all your life, so make good ones and aspire to be great in the right way, no matter what you do — sports or business or teaching,” said Brock Sports Director Neil Lumsden, one of three speakers at the 2017 Badgers Believe in Clean Sport community engagement event hosted by Brock’s women’s hockey team Friday afternoon.

Nearly 1,000 elementary and high school students took part in the event held at the Seymour-Hannah Sports and Entertainment Complex.

Before the Badgers women’s team played the University of Toronto in a regular-season game on their home ice, the students listened to Lumsden, Badgers hockey player Brody Silk and Niagara River Lions player Chris Commons talk about the importance of staying away from appearance- and performance-enhancing drugs.

Lumsden used the example of his son Jesse, a former professional football player turned Olympic bobsleigh athlete as someone who was able to reach the highest levels of sport without cheating.

“It’s all out there. It’s easy to find,” Lumsden said of performance-enhancing drugs. “These kids are approached in high school with people saying I can get you what you want. For us, it’s about getting to these kids before they get to high school because they will be approached. We have to get these kids to understand the consequences.”

The event was a collaboration between Brock Sports and the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport, which runs the Succeed Clean prevention and education program.

A large team worked behind the scenes to make the event a success, including fourth-year kinesiology student Michelle Schevers, who headed up the organization team.

“I’m so excited with how it turned out,” she said. “I think this is great for the students because I can talk to them for an hour and they might not take it in, but when you get someone like Chris Commons or Brody Silk talking about their experiences, the kids love it.”