True North's 20 Under 20 List 2023: Athletes 20-16
Part one of this new series highlighting some of the best young Canadian athletes.
Canada is the homeplace of world class athletes in nearly every sport you can think of.
Connor McDavid, Penny Oleksiak, Alphonso Davies, Marie-Philip Poulin, and Andre De Grasse are just a small handful of the Canadian athletes that are considered to be among the best in the world in their respective sports. There are also countless other Canadians who have impressed in various events and leagues, hopefully some of which you have read about here on True North.
In this new series, 20 Under 20, I’m going to highlight some of the next generation of Team Canada athletes, most of whom are already representing Canada on the international stage in some capacity. In the coming years, new stars will emerge from unexpected places of course, as they always do, but there are already many young Canadians who are turning heads.
The criteria for this list is simple: the athlete must be born on or after January 1, 2003 — turning 20 years old this year, or younger.
Below are names 20 to 16 on the countdown. Part two with names 15 to 11 will be posted on Tuesday, 10 to 6 will come out on Thursday, and the top five will be revealed on Saturday. Stay tuned!
20) Jacob Zibin, Baseball
Toronto-born, Langley, B.C.-raised pitcher Jacob Zibin was one of the youngest players available in the 2022 Major League Baseball draft, aged just 17, but came away from it with his name in the record books.
Zibin, who was selected 301st overall by the Cleveland Guardians, signed with the team and earned an MLB-record for the biggest signing bonus ever given to a 10th-round pick, $1.2 million USD. To put it into perspective, the value for a player taken 301st overall is $151,900 USD according to the league, and Zibin earned over a million more than anyone else taken in his round.
The 6’4 right-hander can hit the mid-90s with his fastball, and also throws a changeup and breaking ball that turned heads at the combine. Guardians director of amateur scouting Scott Barnsby told MLB.com that the former Canadian junior national team standout is “another guy we couldn’t be more excited about the player development group getting their hands on.”
He’s likely at least a few years away from hitting the Majors, but Jacob Zibin should be a name that Canadian baseball fans keep an eye on.
19) Jaden Weekes, Tennis
Lasalle, Quebec’s Jaden Weekes was named Tennis Canada’s Male Junior Player of the Year in 2022 after a breakout season.
The 18-year-old won four junior titles (one singles, three doubles) in 2022, and competed at the junior competitions at all four majors. He finished the year ranked 48th on the junior circuit by the International Tennis Federation, after reaching a career-high junior ranking of 21st in the world.
Now transitioning into the ATP senior circuit, Weekes is currently ranked 1,387th in singles and 1,260 in doubles, but is yet to play a match in 2023 at that level, instead going the NCAA route.
He’s currently playing for the University of Kentucky, where fellow Montrealers Christophe Clement, Taha Baadi and Alexandre LeBlanc (Weekes’ doubles partner for the school’s team) are also part of the men’s tennis roster. There are a number of Canadians on the men’s team at Kentucky, with Liam Draxl of Newmarket, ON, Joshua Lapadat of London, ON, and Toronto’s Jonathan Sorbo also representing the Wildcats.
Whether Weekes chooses to focus his attention on singles or doubles at the professional level remains to be seen, but with the retirement of Daniel Nestor a few years ago, Canada often lacks a true men’s doubles specialist — with Vasek Pospisil teaming up with one of Canada’s singles stars Félix Auger-Aliassime or Denis Shapovalov during their Davis Cup title run last year.
Doubles could be an avenue for Weekes to become a crucial part of Team Canada in the years to come, if he wishes to do so. He’s an exciting young talent nevertheless.
18) Katie Cosgriffe, Swimming
Canada’s rise to one of the leading nations in the pool over the past few years has been nothing short of remarkable, and it isn’t showing any signs of slowing down just yet, evidenced by there being a handful of swimmers on this list.
One of Canada’s brightest talents in the pool is Katie Cosgriffe, who broke onto the radars of Canadian swimming fans with a standout performance at the Canada Games last summer in Niagara. The 16-year-old competed in seven women’s para swimming events at the Games, and came away with medals in all of them — six of them gold, and one of them silver, narrowly missing the clean sweep.
In December, Cosgriffe was recognized as one of the recipients of the 2022-2023 Victor Davis Memorial Fund Awards, earning some money to help with training and other expenses.
Cosgriffe has a neurological disorder called Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT), which “causes sensations, and loss of normal functions, in the feet, arms, hands and legs”. She has spoken about her desire to compete at the Paralympic Games, and if she keeps swimming at the level she is now, a strong performance at the Canadian trials could book her a spot as early as Paris 2024 next year.
She’s won medals at the Canadian Swimming Trials before — finishing first in the 100m butterfly multi-class para event, and third in the 400m freestyle event in 2022 — and will be someone to watch over the next year-and-a-half in the leadup to the Paralympics.
17) Brooke D’Hondt, Snowboarding
Calgary’s Brooke D’Hondt was Canada’s youngest athlete at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, competing in the snowboard halfpipe event. The 18-year-old, who was 16 in Beijing, made the final after a couple of strong runs in qualifying, and would end up finishing tenth in her Olympic debut.
She then won a bronze medal at the FIS World Junior Championships a few weeks after the Games.
As a 14-year-old, she finished sixth at the 2020 Winter X Games in Aspen, one of the biggest events in the sport, and she has since continued to showcase her talents on the international stage.
D’Hondt recently finished tenth at the 2023 FIS Snowboard World Championships, just missing the top-eight run in the qualifying round needed to qualify for the final. Fellow up-and-coming Canadian talent Elizabeth Hosking won silver in that event.
If she continues her current trajectory, it might not be long before D’Hondt is picking up medals at these events herself. With an Olympics already under her belt, she’ll be one to watch in the leadup to Milano Cortina 2026 and beyond.
16) Natalie Corless, Luge
Natalie Corless made her Olympic debut at Beijing 2022 as part of Canada’s exciting young trio of female lugers — then aged 18, alongside then-19-year-old Trinity Ellis and then-21-year-old Makena Hodgson. The trio are now 19, 20 and 22, respectively.
Corless is from New Westminster, B.C., about two hours away from Whistler and the state-of-the-art sliding track built for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, and she has now developed there as an exciting young talent in the sport.
Alongside fellow teenager Caitlin Nash, Corless won a silver medal for Canada at the Lausanne 2020 Winter Youth Olympic Games in women’s doubles luge, an event which will make its Olympic debut at Milan-Cortina 2026. The event was previously an open event (which has historically only been competed by men), but in 2026 it will be split into men’s and women’s events for the first time.
Corless also finished just outside the medals in the singles event in Lausanne, finishing in fourth place. In Beijing last winter she finished 16th after choosing to focus on singles in the leadup to the Games, but has since teamed up again with Nash for doubles.
The pair became the first women ever to compete in an open doubles event on the World Cup circuit, aged just 16 when they took part in a competition in Whistler. They also became the first Canadian duo to win a World Cup medal in a women’s doubles luge event, winning bronze in Park City, Utah in December.
Corless is a rising talent in a sport which Canada isn’t known for dominating. Whether it’s in singles, or doubles with Nash, she could very much be a medal contender in Cortina d'Ampezzo in a few years time during her second Olympics.
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