Sienna Deschambeault (submiited photo/Rustin Deschambeault)

By Ben Tompkins

Importance of Sports

Cumberland House football player gets knee surgeries in U.S. in hopes of returning to the gridiron

Feb 13, 2025 | 9:55 AM

A female football player from Cumberland House recently travelled down to the United States for multiple knee surgeries.

While they could have been done in Canada, Sienna Deschambeault didn’t want to wait as long as it would’ve taken for her to just get off the waiting list.

“We wanted to get this done as soon as possible and we would’ve been on the waiting list for a couple of years. She has contacts with CFL players, and along with some of her coaches, they guided her in the right direction on where to get these surgeries done,” explained Sienna’s older brother, Rustin.

Sienna suffered contact and non-contact injuries on separate occasions playing football, resulting in a torn meniscus and a partial ACL tear.

Unfortunately, she ended up playing through the first injury, as none of her family members had ever dealt with an injury like this one and didn’t know what to do. They also didn’t get Sienna checked out until after the second injury occurred.

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And while these particular injuries don’t necessarily need surgery right away, it has forced her to not be able to do what she loves.

“I think football has really changed everything she is about, she was a very quiet kid until recently when she started getting into sports. She used to be very shy and didn’t really talk to anybody, she was just very quiet and introverted. Now, she has a bunch of friends, she talks to everybody, and it’s just really opened her up… I don’t know where she’d be without it,” Rustin added.

“We didn’t know the extent of her injury at all or how bad it was. Sienna sat out for a long time and she was expecting to play football this year, but she just couldn’t get back into it because it didn’t feel right for her. We finally got her knee checked out and found out everything was torn.”

Not only has football changed Sienna’s personal life but it’s also changed her living situations.

Sienna was playing in Fort McKay, Alta. just north of Fort McMurray, on an Indigenous team called the Northern Spirits.

That’s where she is now, living with one of the coaches who actually previously coached in the Cumberland House area, as she aims to rehabilitate from a successful knee surgery which occurred in Maine, USA.

The surgery costed close to $30,000, as Rustin has set up a GoFundMe page, having already raised just over $3,000 with an additional roughly $2,500 coming from community members in the Cumberland House area.

“I set up the page because as her big brother, I feel responsible for taking care of her and I was the one who got her into football in the first place. It only felt right that I at least tried to contribute to having made this surgery go a little bit more smoothly,” concluded Rustin.

According to the latest statistics from 2023, only 31 percent of knee replacements in Saskatchewan are being done within the Canadian wait time benchmark of 182 days.

Also, as of October 2024, there were 548 people in the North East waiting for orthopedic surgery.

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news@northeastnow.com

On X: @BenTompkins_8