Humboldt Bronco’s (Re) Forming Stage

Posted September 10, 2018January 27, 2022 Glen MulcahyLeave a commentPosted in Athlete, Coach, Organization Executive, Parents, Uncategorized

Earlier this year I wrote on Tuckman’s development model of small groups and I read a great article this weekend in the National Post talking about Humboldt’s Comeback and they continue going thru their grieving period with a new team and organization for this season.

Below is a video recap interviewing the new head coach Nathan Oystrick as he talks about the challenges he faces rebuilding the proud franchise after the tragic accident earlier this year that reached millions of people across the globe.

Nathan grew up in Saskatchewan, played junior hockey in Canada then was on a journeyman path playing college, then various professional stints in Europe and North America including 65 games in the NHL with the Atlanta Thrashers organization.

When management was queried what they were looking for in the new coach, they shared they wanted “someone that was going to care about their kids” which is the most important aspect of coaching.

At no point did they say they wanted a coach that ran certain power play systems, breakout and regroups or other tactics and systems that too many youth minor hockey coaches focus on.

In a whiteboard pregame talk in the video, Nathan tells the players to go out there and have fun and compete.

This coming Wednesday, Sept. 12th, the NEW Humbolt Bronco’s will be hitting the ice to play their first regular season game which will be broadcast live by both TSN and CTV Saskatchewan 5:30 PM, 6:30 PM Central Time, 8:30 PM EST.

The very fact that this game is going to happen in the first place just shows how resilient the members of the Humboldt community are they lost their head coach/general manager, assistant coach, radio analyst, driver, trainer and 11 players.

The remaining players on the bus were injured, some seriously, some were able to walk away with scrapes and bruises but the end result was Humbolt, Junior Hockey and Sports, in general, was tragically impacted that day, April 6th, 2018.

They have now completed the forming stage, the first stage of group development according to Tuckman’s work, the big unknown is how are they going to deal with the remaining stages?

The next stage, storming, I suspect will start this coming Wednesday when the team hits the ice, coaching staff, trainers and all the fans including families of those lost and injured in the crash, friends, colleagues, former players and numerous others. Although I suspect there will be a moment of silence, the world will be cheering for Humboldt as they continue to go thru their healing process.

Nathan gets teary-eyed in the interview when talking about what people are going to say, how are they going to react when the team takes the ice at home for their first regular season game?

I suspect there will be a lot of teary eyes in the stands and I for one plan to be streaming the game including pregame ceremonies to see how they go thru their storming stage so can get to some sense of normalcy (if there will be such a thing this season) so they can perform and compete as the season goes on.

I also believe I won’t be the only one that is watching Nathan and the team with great interest to see how they build on the proud legacy of #Humboldt Strong as the world found out not that long ago in April.

The gofund me campaign that reached over $1 Million dollars in what seemed like minutes and to date has raised over $15 Million, the press coverage they received including images from supporters worldwide including their pic that was tweeted (and subsequently retweeted by thousands) of the child from Uganda with stick by the door who received funding from Humboldt as one of their designated charities prior to the charity.

This is why Humboldt’s tragedy, their rebuild as an organization will be followed with great interest as they continue to go thru the group development stages.

I for one can hardly wait for them to get to the performing stage and be a contender and compete in playoffs as new head coach Nathan aspires them to.

Until then, we all must be patient and recognize that it may be a season or more before that happens.

Until then, I plan to just Love Watching them play, as I did all of the teams I have coached to date as recommend parents of young boys and girls do the same.

#Humboldt Strong #leaveyoursticksout

“à bientôt” (see you soon)

Posted August 24, 2018January 27, 2022 Glen MulcahyLeave a commentPosted in Athlete, Coach, Organization Executive, Parents, Uncategorized

For the last couple of months we have been going thru a move from our former office, a 2 story warehouse with office buildout that was very cold in winter, very hot in summer as we had no HVAC systems and we have now officially moved into a new 2^nd floor office space with HVAC, multiple workstations, a boardroom, a “real” lunchroom and fully wired for sound with Fibre Optic to permit us to upload and download audio and videos much faster than we were able to in prior office space.

We also will be able to host workshops in our open area for 20 or so, and the ability to rent and ultimately lease the adjacent office space to host workshops and presentations for groups up to 80 vs. having to rely on orgs to provide meeting spaces with all the A/V setup for our presentations.

Why am I doing a post this week on the subject of our move?

Because yesterday I said, “à bientôt”, ( = see you soon) to our most recent co-op student who had worked with us this summer and continued to add to the building blocks of prior students since we started a few years back.

Her name is Myla, and she was responsible for editing and uploading all of the interviews for our inaugural For the Love of the Game Youth Sports Digital Summit that we hosted mid-July. She also created the new blog thumbnails, quote templates for both PARADIGM Sports and our digital arm For the Love of the Game in addition to posting to all of our social media platforms including setting up our Instagram account.

The reason I am sharing this is when I went thru her evaluation as a part of the co-op requirements, she shared with me that her experience working with us this summer was unbelievable, mainly as we are advocates for providing a safe to fail environment for all of our staff just as I do when I coach teams. We also have a zero tolerance for ANY forms of harassment, something that many NCAA schools in particular need to implement, including the most recent at Maryland University due to prehistoric coaching practices that lead to the death of one of their football players from heat exhaustion.

She was not the first, nor will be the last co-op student that will work with us, and each time that there last day comes it is a difficult one for me as I look back on the prior 4 months and am truly amazed of everything that they have accomplished by praising their effort, encouraging them to make mistakes vs. being concerned about outcomes and the fallacy of being perfect as I learned from an executive coach I worked with there is no such thing.

This is the main issue that I see with many youth sports coaches, regardless of the sport they are coaching, until they have coached for many years and realize there is so much more to coaching than writing up a drill on a whiteboard or drawing up lines, positions for games. Particularly in today’s environment with the pay to play system and emphasis on winning at all costs that have been outlined in numerous articles and press that we have contributed to.

Prior to Myla, there were several other co-op students that were instrumental in our growth as an organization, whether developing our websites, social media platforms, graphic design, research, creating data systems, audio and video editing.

Every single one of the students has shared with me how much they enjoyed the experience, learned a ton and gained valuable work experience to prepare them for the workforce after they graduated and all have reached out to me for references or commented on posts we have done thru social media.

The first was Mitch, he worked with me as was coming up with the initial business plan and brainstorming for PARADIGM Sports in the summer of 2015.

Another former co-op student was Jordan, who worked with us last fall term, and was responsible for creating our For the Love of the Game Website on our hosting platform for online training and setting the building blocks for us to be able to host our first digital summit.

Just last week he sent me these two images of the great John Wooden, one when he was coaching Kareem Abdul Jabar at UCLA when they went on their great run of national championships, the other when Kareem was walking with John 38 years later during an event to honour him at halftime for his contributions to coaching and the development of the young men at UCLA under his watch. Some of which including Kareem went on to play in the NBA, many others became doctors, lawyers or other professionals in the workplace and have left positive legacies thanks to John’s guidance as COACH.

Another of our students, Melvin, worked with us last Spring, he created our original WordPress site and registration links for the love the game.org for our inaugural live conference where we created our first wave of training modules with some amazing speakers. He then went to China for a back to back co-op as a hockey instructor as they are aspiring to put a competitive team together for the winter Olympics they will be hosting in 2022. His partner, Chase, when we were going thru the interviews made me aware of various grant programs to help us sponsor co-op students and was instrumental in creating our new PARADIGM Sports website last spring which we continue to build on today.

Two others, Danette and Karly that worked with us a couple of years back, were key in developing the initial WordPress PARADIGM Sports Website, powerpoint decks, logo, colors, business card design and sourcing imagery for blogs.

Karly shared this with me after she completed her co-op term,

“My time working for Glen was great – not only do you learn about business practices you also learn a lot about yourself. Though his guidance and mentorship, I gained confidence in my work abilities and succeeded in areas of my job that I presumed to be impossible. For example, I never thought that I would be able to create and maintain a website with no prior training, but Glen was confident that I could figure it out, which gave me sureness in my own capabilities. This is how he treated every task that was foreign to me – he believed that it was possible for me to accomplish it and knew I would benefit from learning something new. With some dedication, encouragement, and help from Google (and Youtube) I have found a new sense of certainty in my work and what I can produce.

Glen also instills a great amount of trust and loyalty in his employees, which is reflected in the work he does. He is incredibly passionate about youth sports and making a positive change in this environment. It was great to learn from someone who is so invested in making a difference and who truly cares about this matter. His high values and business integrity were very impactful and they will be brought forward into my future career.”

Needless to say, when I read this I got weepy-eyed that I had this type of impact but as I have continued to learn more about transformational leadership, that is the effect it has. In lieu of old-school coaching/leadership that creates an environment of fear and hesitation, it provides the opportunity for people to thrive and achieve things they never thought were possible.

In the summer of 2016 I attended John O’Sullivan’s Way of Champions inaugural conference, was unable to go last year but went again this June and connected with all of my Changing the Game Projects counterparts and interacted with over 100 coaches from across the world that was looking for more insight on transformational coaching, something that still in its infancy in youth sports and is our focus to change in Canada and beyond.

The last contribution that Myla did in her last couple of weeks was developing the Love what you Play podcast platform that will permit us to host the audio-only clips of our interviews from digital summits as well as other interviews going forward.

Our first podcast launches today, my talk with James Leath, and he shares insight on his new organization he founded Unleash the Athlete and his role working in the Esports segment coaching Egamers for a team that is owned by Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys. He also talks about the importance of engaging parents on your team and many other tidbits.

Pic of coin provided to all coaches at the Way of Champions conference, this one outlining core values on the back with the first being fearlessness.

When we were at the first Way of Champions conference, I recall all too well how James reminded us all of one of the quotes from Dr. Jerry Lynch made on Friday evening as we were all wrapping up Sunday afternoon to head to the airport to return to all of our various homes.

“I don’t have a Job (this from one of the top Sport Psychologists in the USA who has guided over 30 teams to NCAA national championships and worked with Steve Kerr and the Golden State Warriors in recent years winning NBA championships and author of 13 books)

When you have a job, all you are doing is making a living, paying the bills.

In lieu, I learned long ago that my calling, purpose if you like, is to make a difference.

As coaches, our calling is to make a difference developing youth into adults.”

That was an epiphany moment for me and all the other coaches that were sitting on the gym floor in 104 degrees heat with no AC in Boulder, Colorado and as our most recent co-op student tapped the sign I finally got up from unpacking “Play like a Champion Today” and headed down the stairs for the last time it was further reinforcement that is our role as coaches, leaders, managers, teachers.

Each week we will be releasing another podcast to coincide with our newsletter and as we now have a dedicated space in our new office we are calling the “Green Room” (due to green screen and green workstation that my kids said why are you moving this Dad, it’s UGLY but it I countered back it is functional) will be sharing video clips as well as working on incremental training modules.

This fall we will have two new co-op students, Cairo and Francis, working on the podcast, our next digital summit and continuing to build our social media platforms to provide you insight from ourselves and our various allies in the space who are aspiring for the much needed change needed to reduce the attrition rates and a generation of kids missing out on what should be a “transformational” youth sports experience so it ultimately leads to being active as adults.

As I have with all prior co-op students, I am looking forward to seeing how they continue to build on the prior blocks from prior students and how they thrive in a safe to fail environment that strongly believes in the Growth Mindset “I can’t do that YET” vs. fixed mindset “I can’t do that”.

We would love to hear from you in terms of feedback on what we can do to help you as a parents of young kids involved in youth sports, help you become the best coach you can be or administrators to develop cultures of excellence so you not only recruit, but retain your players and ultimately grow your programs.

Let’s all work together to bring the game back to the kids …. where it belongs.

Please ensure that your legacy is a positive one and you recognize your role as a coach is to develop youth into adults, not just writing up X’s and O’s on a whiteboard.

What (winning at all costs) rep sports are really doing to kids

Posted August 20, 2018January 27, 2022 Glen MulcahyLeave a commentPosted in Athlete, Coach, Early Sport Specialization, Parents

Last week I shared out the article that I contributed to in Today’s Parents Summer Edition, “What rep sports are really doing to kids” that was written by Courtey Shea and digital edition was released on Aug. 10th.

I thought it would be good to share some insight on how the article came to fruition and some of the key takeaways that I thought Courteney did a great job highlighting.

The title itself resonated with me, but as you will note I added: “winning at all costs” to the title of this weeks post as it is that tipping point that is taking the rep or recreational youth sports experience away from kids where it belongs.

Courteney references the terms “professionalism, adultification, specialization” going hand in hand with competitive (rep) sports which is something that I started to see with both my kids that played in the rep streams in Hockey and Softball which completely differed from my rep or club experience in several sports I played. Then it was all about the spirit of the competition, playing with players of like skill level and truly loving what you played, now it is adults competing with other adults thru kids.

This is why the likes of the example she cited to start the article, the U8 AAA baseball team that had 70 kids try out and 58 were released after three days of tryouts.

Really?

Shouldn’t 7-year-old still be playing T-Ball per Baseball Canada’s LTAD model? Then learn to play in Tadpole 8-9 years old with a pitching machine for 1/2 the games, then allowing the kids to pitch with rotating pitchers adhering to max pitch counts with age-appropriate throwing distances thereafter?

Last summer the co-op student that worked with me was one of those AAA caliber baseball players going back to his early childhood, he said the hardest thing that he had to deal with early on was when he was the last release of the Little League World Series team when he was 12 years old. This year, the Whalley Little League program has qualified to represent Canada, a program that I know several kids have moved to for optimal skills and overall development. What many don’t know, is Whalley is the equivalent of New York’s Harlem, it is had the long-term reputation as not being the greatest place to live or work, but year after year their baseball program field very competitive teams.

Even the parent coach of the Leaside Leafs, Jesse Harrison, is quoted:

In terms of my contributions, a couple of clarification points I would like to share;

The reference to Jordan Spieth was a disconnect with myself and Courteney as the interview and subsequent verification coordinator was months back, Jordan did not focus on golf until he graduated from high school, 18 years old, vs. when he entered (at 13). When he was 12 (grade 6) he told his parents he wanted to focus on golf and they refused as both were multi-sport athletes and knew the benefits, so he continued to play golf in addition to football (fall), basketball (winter), baseball (summer) each year. Football he was a quarterback, Baseball he was a pitcher and basketball he was the point guard, the most skilled positions in the respective sports.

The reason Jordan Speith became the 23 Million Man at 22 years old is that is is an amazing ATHLETE, not just a great golfer who won the Fedex Cup and at one point ranked #1 golfer in the world.

2. In terms of the introduction to my background, yes, I played football, in fact I played on a team that won provincials (equivalent to state) while playing receiver/running back, cornerback and on all special teams so I rarely was off the field, but I also won provincials in Hockey, a Gold Medal in Rugby, tournaments in baseball, basketball on the various organized teams I played for. I also self-taught myself to golf, ski, was a member of first aid ski patrol for a few years and numerous other free play activities like biking, running, fishing, beach volleyball, tackle frisbee, British bulldog and so on.

Like Jordan, I was a good overall athlete, and even though I focused on sports in my late teens, I chose two, Football in the fall, Rugby in the Spring and played both into my 20’s until knee injuries and concussions took their toll (albeit the concussions were not from sports, is another story in itself)

This is why I am such an advocate for multi-sport participation, kids should sample as many sports and activities as you can in their youth from 5 to late teens (16-17 yrs old) before they choose the sport THEY LOVE.

Specializing in one sport before that make it work, leads to overuse injuries, and more often than not will lead to hanging up those skates, cleats, shoes or what have you for good vs. being active well beyond high school.

” I would really like to stress the fact that multi-sport athleticism is critical for the development of the child”

It is really difficult when writers, journalists, news anchors reach out to tell the whole story, especially when they are reaching out to numerous others but I thought Courteney nailed it out of the park to give insight to parents of young children to promote being active in as many sports as possible and buck the current trends of specializing too early.

The proof is in the pudding in terms of paybacks if you aspire for your son or daughter to play at the highest level possible, to do so, they must be the best ATHLETE possible, not the best hockey, soccer, baseball, basketball player.

Every high-level coach that I know from AAA youth sports to professional, collegiate will tell you the same thing, they recruit great athletes who are great people with GREAT PARENTS (not the vocal minority who are acting up in the stands). Kids that specialize early are also deprived from being normal kids sampling not only various sports but music, drama, art, dance, literature and learning various group dynamics by being on multiple sports teams with different coaches, players, parents etc.

So as I end every talk that I do when I am talking about specialization;

Do you know what you are going to do in life?

Most of us don’t figure it out until we are in our 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s IF we ever do.

How then can you be the adult either recommending or accepting the recommendation from another to tell a 7-year-old kid they are going to specialize in one sport over 9 months of the year, in most cases 12 months of the year?

Deprive them of a normal childhood of just being a kid, trying as many things as possible before they find what they LOVE later in life.

Please don’t cave into the marketing, recruitment policies and buck the trends.

Say NO to Early Sport Specialization.

Rep sports are not supposed to be year-round sports, the term rep means they are teams to represent their communities to compete with teams in other communities to permit players of like skill, whether it be A, AA, AAA level.

I also could not agree more with Jesse’s quote, we really need to eliminate the word elite when it comes to referencing KIDS.

Elite should only be referenced for Olympians or Accomplished Professional athletes.

Other than that, they are just early bloomers or just good overall athletes continuing to work on their craft.

Let’s all work together to bring the game back to the kids … where it belongs.

Early Sport Specialization is just wrong.

Posted August 13, 2018January 27, 2022 Glen MulcahyLeave a commentPosted in Athlete, Coach, Organization Executive, Parents

This past week my son was at his annual west coast prep camp that he started participating in several years back as a player where many top level players in hockey go for 10 ice sessions, games, dryland with some of the top coaches in the game.

Marc Crawford, Phil Johnson, Ryan Walter, Barry Smith and many other NHL coaches, NCAA Div I, II and II as well as Junior A/B coaches participate in the camps that run for a week at a time to get instruction to take their games to the next level.

I never will forget the first camp he attended as a player, at 12 years old in his second year of peewee and how much he packed, a full hockey bag, a duffel bag almost the same size, a backpack, sweatshirt, pants only to find that the particular week in Port Alberni was 38 degrees and even though worked hard on ice, was much cooler than outside.

As it was his first year at the camp, like many hockey coaches, I wanted to see first hand how a top-notch camp was run so I went over for a day and watched many of the ice sessions lead by the professional coaches so I could then share with the volunteer coaches in my clinics tips and tricks to run efficient practices.

I connected with my son later that day and he said the experience had been AWESOME, although was starting to experience skate bite from his laces and was not a big fan of scrambled eggs and avoiding the table with peanut butter (due to allergies to peanuts)

I offered to take him for dinner before I was going to head to catch the late ferry to return home and he said he would rather hang out with his new “buds”

Each year he would return to the camp, even after he decided not to play winter hockey, and this was the first year after he aged out of minor hockey and was asked to come as an on-ice instructor/captain for one of the younger age groups.

This particular week, one of the guest coaches was Brendan Morrison, former NHL player who started his career with the NJ Devils and was traded and played the majority of his career for the Vancouver Canucks, played on the top line with Marcus Naslund and Todd Bertuzzi in their respective career years in points individually and as a line. They were called the west coast express as a result and qualified for playoffs (unlike last 3 years where the Canucks have not made the playoffs and recently lost their president Trevor Linden due to power struggle with owners).

One evening Brendan participated in a panel session interview and offered up a couple of tidbits that my son shared when we had dinner the night he came back;

Brendan shared that he absolutely did not believe in early sports specialization and
He believed in free-range parenting as a father of 3 girls and a boy and encouraged to play, get outside without supervision

My son could relate to both as we have numerous conversations on the subjects over the years both in my role with PARADIGM sports but also as a parent and coach as many know from contributions I have done for various news articles and affiliate blogs.

Needless to say, it was refreshing to hear that a former NHL player, Hobey Baker Award winner as top NCAA player who had a long career was against specialization and advocating for kids to play as many sports as possible until they found the one they loved.

Early Sports Specialization continues to be a hot topic, so much so that I was asked to contribute to another follow-up article on the subject for a national Canadian Magazine that is supposed to be in an upcoming edition which I will share out once it goes to print.

I was also surprised they got on the subject of free-range parenting, whom Lenore Skenazy made famous when she launched her site www.freerangekids.com to combat helicopter/snowblower and lawnmower parents where kids have been taken to police offices due to “reports of abuse” when parents encouraged them to take the bus, subway, play in the park on their own without their immediate supervision.

This I also am 100% in support of, I remember one of the reasons that kids don’t get their 2000 steps in today walking to/from school is due to the white van as parents fear their kids will be abducted. Kids need to have play time unsupervised, need to learn how to fall and get up on their own, even if it means there will be some bruises, scratches along the way. If parents don’t encourage kids to do so, how will they fair when they face real adversity later in life?

Our backyard since both my kids were very young was a myriad of sports balls, bats, sticks, hoops and we live a couple of blocks from a ball field and park that my wife and I would tell our kids to go to get their daily dose of activity in addition to the various sports they played.

We even encouraged them to walk to/from schools, 30-45 minute walks each way, but would drive them to school if the weather was really, really nasty (the same our parents did)

Whenever I have done talks on the subject, I have shared the video that is part of this weeks newsletter from Bill Meiers show when he interviewed Dave Barry and talked about free range parenting and how his mother would share …..

“Don’t Drown”

Like Dave’s mother, my mother would say to me or my brother before we left for the day to scour for garter snakes, go to ball fields, lacrosse boxes, fish in streams, jump our bikes over ramps, climb and fall from trees and so on … BE HOME FOR DINNER. Other than that it was fair game, kids need more of that now more than ever, thanks to sports being adultified which has to lead to the specialization epidemic, they need their free play time.

Although free-range laws have not been passed in Canada to the best of my knowledge, both Utah and Arkansas have now incorporated legislation to protect parents who aspire their kids to be just that, KIDS and encourage them to walk to/from school, play in the park or backyard unsupervised (within reason).

At what point we find the happy medium where kids play again without fear of criticism from adults or adults are permitted to let their kids walk home from school without having police and social services knocking on their doors remains to be seen.

Hopefully, it happens sooner than later, we need to let kids BE kids again.

Let’s all work together to bring the game back to the kids … where it belongs.

I want to try the impossible ….

Posted August 6, 2018January 27, 2022 Glen MulcahyLeave a commentPosted in Athlete, Coach, Organization Executive, Parents

Source – Terry Fox Foundation

For the past couple of months I have been going thru the whirlwind of moves, I sold my warehouse/office so that we could get into a more appropriate office only layout and also helped my inlaws move out of their house the in-laws literally around the same time.

The day of their completion was the day of my marathon move day Aug 2nd, 15 hours, thanks in part to the moving company double booking their third mover and were able to find someone in operations to fill in (who had NO moving experience).

Our new office is on the second floor, with 24 steps separated by a landing that the movers and even myself and friends and family that have helped out have taken a rest while we moved the furniture, filing cabinets, desks, computers, printers and everything so we would have the workstations required for our expansion and accommodate future growth.

All the while I was going thru the viewings of potential new spaces, then finalizing the lease on what is now our office with an adjacent meeting area the landlord has agreed to rent us on case by case basis for our live presentations. More to follow on that front once we procure the chairs, tables for us to permit us to do so.

I kept saying to myself and others that I was going thru a marathon daily and shared analogies like on a much smaller scale and can truly appreciate what Terry Fox must have went thru in his quest to cross Canada on one leg after he lost his other leg to Cancer.

My Nanny (grandmother) was a huge fan of Terry, she even had an area in her apartment with news paper clippings, prints and various other memorabilia that I have in one of the many, many boxes that are still staged in the open area of our new office that I plan to do the same.

She would often share one his quotes with me whenever I was up against various challenges in my youth in sports or school one her favorite quotes from Terry “I want to try the impossible so I can prove it can be done.”

The reason it was her favorite is she was one of my biggest role models growing up, she raised 9 children (yes 9) in the era starting in the depression, second world war for the most part on her own as she divorced my grandfather soonafter the 9^th child was born.

The older siblings started to work as early as 12-13 and the oldest 3 did not complete high school but the work ethic that she instilled in every single one of them was one that I will never forget. What she did in a sense many would feel is impossible in today’s era where most families only have 2-3 children due largely to the costs to raise kids, pay for horrendous mortgages, gas and spiraling costs requiring both guardians to work.

This is why Terry became such a role model for me as she would reference the adversity that he went thru to accomplish what many felt was impossible at the time.

When he embarked on his journey to raise funds for cancer in April 12^th 1980, all the naysayers running a marathon EVERY day (26 miles) and did so each day only taking 4 days off of 137 days, one day to spend time with a 10 year old boy who also lost his leg to Canada.

Can you imagine running ONE marathon in a year? I know many people that train for many months to participate in the Vancouver Sun Run, others that train for biathalons, but I can’t imagine for an instance how he did what he did each and every day, getting up a 4AM, running 14 miles, then taking a break to fuel up, and run a subsequent 12 miles.

It was his determination, commitment that lead to all the accolades he received but even after he had to stop when the cancer returned and spread to lungs he shared with reporters if he could return to complete the marathon of hope he would.

Sadly he was not able to return to finish his cross country marathon, and his journey ended after 3000 miles in Thunder Bay, approx. 2/3 of his goal to return home to his home town in Pitt Meadows, BC (outskirts of Vancouver).

Whenever I see kids today say “I can’t” in a practice or a game I say to them, yes you can, push yourself so you can say after the practice or game that you left everything you had out there. These were the very same words of wisdom my Nanny would share with me, thanks in part to her following the likes of Terry and many others who never gave up like she did raising 9 kids on her own while never “working” a day in her life (she remarried to whom we called Papa John who had a great job and provided for her and the younger siblings so she could do what she did best, be a mother and grandmother to all the many cousins afterwards).

This is what Terry did, he left it all out on those highways, thru the weather challenges, the dehydration, initial lack of awareness, the scarring on his stump left after the surgery from the rubbing of the prosthesis, the true fatigue he had each and every day as he head out to run another 26 miles.

Source – Terry Fox Foundation

What drove him?

Kids.

He did not want any other kids to be victims of cancer, or anyone for that matter.

One of the days that he did stop to take a break he spent time with a 10 year old Greg Skun who also lost his leg to cancer and cried when he shared why he was doing so as it was one of his most inspirational days.

Terry was the example for us all, the legacy that he left behind thru his marathon of hope has now raised over $500 Million for cancer research.

Although we are still over a month away from this years Terry Fox Run, each day that I haul boxes, furniture and so forth from my old space to the new space I think of Terry and my Nanny sharing her quote as I too want to try the impossible to show it can be done.

When I founded PARADIGM Sports several years back, I did so initially because of the year I had in 2013, I had my knee scoped in January and lost my best friend a few days later, then having to make the decision in August to put my mother (my biggest fan) into a hospice and she passed away on Oct. 8^th, 2013 in the evening, a few hours before my birthday.

It was that 2013-14 hockey season where my son had a winning at all costs coach that then set the wheels in motion to ensure that ALL kids have the opportunity to contribute to the outcome of games with positive feedback so they could try they also can try the impossible to show it could be done.

The state of play of youth sports evolving to adults competing with other adults thru kids has to lead to attrition rates where 70% of kids are quitting youth sports before they enter high school.

In Canada, that number could be in the area of 2.1 Million kids alone from the top five sports (swimming, soccer, dance, ice hockey, skating)

My dream is to ensure that all kids in Canada, as well as other parts of the world working with all of our global partners, have the opportunity to play without fear of criticism, own their youth sports and activities experience as our generation did when we grew up and most of all, have a smile on their face each time they go out there and PLAY.

Like Terry, I won’t give up on my dream and as we go into our new chapter, new office and truly look forward to continuing our work with coaches, parent’s sports administrators to create that environment for kids to have fun enjoying what they love vs. current trends replacing former active play time with inactive screen time.

As you start planning your fall seasons as coaches, executive members, please ensure that you incorporate the Terry Fox Run as part of your teams season vs. scrambling at the 11^th hour to participate. It not only will help continue raising funds for his legacy, but it is a great team bonding activity to start your season.

Source – Terry Fox Foundation

Please ensure that the legacy that you leave behind is a positive one and you are not a kids last coach.