Team Canada football coach Joel Lipinski compares prep, selection for flag vs. tackle

National flag team defensive coordinator from Saskatoon has helped many players prepare for pro training camps in recent years.

SASKATOON — It’s safe to say that Team Canada flag football defensive coordinator Joel Lipinski has been an exceptionally busy person as of late.

Not only has the owner of Ignite Athletics in Saskatoon been working with Football Canada to select the 2026 edition of the national team that will compete at Worlds and Olympic qualifiers in August, he’s also played a role in helping more than a few elite athletes get ready for professional football camps.

Lipinski joined The SportsCage on Monday to talk about the flag football program as well as his work getting athletes from across Canada ready for their respective CFL and NFL training camps.

The previous weekend itself was a big one for the national flag football program, as they held their final selection camp in preparation for Worlds, which take place Aug. 13-16 in Dusseldorf, Germany. A total of 38 players took part — including a couple from Saskatchewan — as Team Canada works its way down to their final roster.

“It went really well, it was awesome,” Lipinski said, adding that the 38 included the 18 players from the 2025 national team and were selected from ID camps all over the country involving more than 200 athletes. “It was a very competitive camp with the players we brought in, very productive.”

As one might expect, the similarities between the flag and tackle games offer coaches a chance to use similar testing regimens, with Lipinski and his fellow coaches putting all that information to use to find the “synergies and differences between a great flag football player and great tackle football athlete.

“It’s a copious amount of data, and we use machine learning and some different statistical analysis to find what we’re looking for to make great male and female flag athletes.”

In many cases, those players often aren’t one and the same, in no small part due to the focus on speed and outright athleticism in the flag game.

“It’s one of those things in every skill-based sport,” Lipinski said. “You have all these athletes who are putting up insane metrics, but if you can’t catch a football, it’s not going to translate over into the sport. So there are some skill components and IQ components that come into it that are intangibles, and you have to create a sort of standard.

“You have an athlete who can run a 5.3 40 and has a massively high IQ, but that athlete is going to have to be able to get open in man-to-man. So what’s the minimum threshold an athlete has from a speed component, an agility component to at least be in consideration to be on the field at an elite level?”

A major difference can be found in the simple size of the players — a 240-pound linebacker who’s a lethal presence in the tackle game might not fit at all into the speedier, low-contact flag version of the sport.

“It’s all the small, nuanced differences,” Lipinski said.

With CFL training camps hitting full speed this weekend — including the Saskatchewan Roughriders, who wrapped up rookie camp on Friday — Lipinski has seen many an athlete come under his purview as they prepare for the pro game. That offers a different kind of training challenge, one focused on the physical aspect of the game and the brief, ultra-high intensity focus of the sport.

“With strength coaches and things like that there are different ideologies, but the thing is when you’re setting up for an NFL or CFL training camp, you have to set the athletes up for a ridiculous amount of volume for the four or five weeks,” Lipinski explained. “Everything is just how we build our resiliency and our capacity so that one, athletes can survive camp and then two, thrive to the extent they can make that team.”

The plan is to build to the point that athletes can go through the 5-to-10 second burst of max effort and 25 seconds of rest up to 140 times or more through a week-long camp.

“You have to make sure that athlete can give you the same effort at rep 140 as rep one, that’s what you end up building for in the off-season,” Lipinski said.

With the final selections for Team Canada coming in the next couple months, the Roughriders hit high gear in their CFL season preparations on Sunday with the beginning of main camp in Saskatoon. Be sure to keep an eye on SportsCage.com for regular stories and updates.