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Helping Canada’s Coaches Find the Way
Back in the ‘70s, a young, eager soccer player/skier from Linz, Austria received an education that continues to serve him well, decades later.
A Masters in mentoring. A PhD in people.
“Yes, I was lucky,’’ confesses Max Gartner. “Very lucky. To have had an amazing example to draw from.”
Baldur Preiml remains an authentic Austrian ski legend, an Olympic bronze medallist who would go on to develop athletes responsible for collecting more than 50 podium finishes at the Olympic Winter Games.
“He just had a different way of connecting with people,’’ recalls Gartner gratefully. “It’s hard to explain. He was just so far ahead of his time. Very sincere. You knew he cared about you. He just gave you this sense of … belief.
“That you could do it. That things were possible. You felt that.”
As a nation, Austrian ski jumping was, at that moment in time, going “nowhere”, recalls Gartner.
After Preiml assumed the role of athletic director/ head of ski jumping at Stams, the nation in short order exploded into powerhouse status.
“I had this amazing role model when I was a young athlete,’’ Gartner continues. “Baldur certainly was an outlier in the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s. Coaches of that time were supposed to be tough. Period.
“Later, in professional soccer and skiing I had some horrible coaches. They just yelled at me. You can learn from them, too - what not to do. But I’d had a glimpse of what else could be achieved.”
That glimpse, the example of his first true mentor, still and always remembered, has held Max Gartner in splendid stead during a diverse career in sport coaching and leadership right up until today in his current role heading up the Master Leaders mentoring offshoot of the Own the Podium/Canadian Olympic Committee’s Pursuit program.
Besides Gartner, the cast list of mentors assembled is a Who’s Who of high-performance experience and achievement - Graham Barton of canoe-kayak; artistic swimming’s Debbie Muir; Calgary business leader and former Paralympian Patrick Jarvis – the man who reshaped Snowboard Canada’s program; speed skating legend Catriona Le May Doan; and Mark Smith, head coach of the Canadian Women’s National Softball Team since 2009.
“Over the years, there has been a whole bunch of different attempts at mentoring, depending on what the flavour of the day was,’’ says Muir. “But whenever you get a one-on-one approach to mentoring coaches or high-performance directors, it’s always worked and we’ve had various iterations of the program over, I’d say, the last 20 years.
“So, it has always been there, but this time I feel the Pursuit program has really done it properly, where you can sustain what’s been started.”
Muir hones her mentoring skills with Great Traits, an applied High-Performance Leadership training company she founded alongside former Canadian swimming great Mark Tewksbury.
Muir and Gartner have known each other a long time. So, she was a natural choice for Masters Leaders.
“I remember looking at the document and thinking ‘Wow! They finally get it’,’’ recalls Muir. “‘This isn’t some jump-through-the-hoop program anymore. It’s really solid in what it’s trying to do.
“Max spends a lot of time on this. He knows us, so when they’re trying to match people up, he's got a pretty clear of view of who would work best with who.
“They’ve got clear goals, lots of personalization so that you do what works for the person you’re mentoring as opposed to following some here’s-how-you-mentor template. It’s really tailored to meet the needs of the person.”
Golf Canada’s high-performance manager Emily Phoenix connected with Catriona Le May Doan through the first cohort of the Canada Leads program, and the two have continued the conversation into Master Leaders.
“I think every sport has its uniqueness, special to the discipline or that sport, but a lot of things we do as national sport organizations are very universal and widely applicable,’’ says Phoenix.
“To have the opportunity to pick someone else’s brain, and certainly Catriona’s got a good one, bounce ideas off her, talk over different situations, get a different perspective that isn’t always golf-focused, is usually very valuable.
“I’ve been fortunate to have some other professional development opportunities through other programs, more golf specific, and what has impressed me about the overall Pursuit program is just the way they’re not afraid to be really hands on and not afraid to get us into situations that push us to be a little bit uncomfortable. That allows us to practice and develop our skills in a really safe environment.”
As a relative newbie - four years on - to the high-performance technical world, Sam Edney can attest to the benefits of that tailoring.
Edney, a four-time Olympian, segued straight from his competitive career into the role of high-performance director at Luge Canada in 2019.
“This,’’ he says definitively, “has been fantastic. I think at times the transition from competing to where I am now has been really enjoyable and smooth. And then at other times it’s been really terrifying because my peers know, the people on the technical-leadership-of-sport side, have being doing this for a long time. They know what’s going on, have seen it all, done it all I’m sort of relying on the dialogue (he and Patrick Jarvis) have developed.”
Jarvis, owner of Amarok Training Centres, a Calgary-based consulting firm specializing in integrated job performance management, stresses that the mentor-mentee relationship is impossible without mutual trust.
“I have a great deal of empathy for those who have jumped in and wanted to take on a leadership role but must have an inordinate amount of questions about their capacity and ability to manage the different issues they face,’’ emphasizes Jarvis. “The Canadian sport system is convoluted and complex, so to navigate those waters the young ones have to be open-minded.
“Especially with athletes converted right off the track or the playing field into a leadership-management role, there is suddenly delayed accomplishment to deal with. A lot of the things they’re working on, they won’t see results for maybe a couple of years. Whereas when you’re on the competitive field, results are instantaneous.”
Quiz the Master mentors on what ranks as the single most indispensable trait in their contribution, and the ability “to listen” invariably pops up.
“A coach shows the way, a mentor helps the coach find the way,’’ explains Gartner. “There’s a subtle difference there.
“The opening is: ‘Yeah, this person has been around.’ That gives you a foot in the door, then you build the relationship and go from there. I’ve worked with 10 coaches so far in this program and it’s been really rewarding.
“It’s really important for them to have someone who understands their world.”
In any true discussion, adds Graham Barton, there is no definitive right or wrong.
“Mentors don’t necessarily have to be people who see things the same way as the mentee,’’ he emphasizes. “If you’re open, there are opportunities to learn from people who you don’t necessarily, in the end, reflect the way you want to go. But it helps you firm up the direction you do want to go.
“Nobody wants to hear ‘This is the way you do it!’ I know I don’t.
“The life is difficult and that’s the part the mentees can get out of it - Oh, shoot, you went through the same thing. I’m never home, people call me at strange hours, not always athletes but parents, and there’s all the different people who want to get a piece of you. It’s sharing those experiences and knowing you’ve done the same thing that helps them feel that they’re not alone.”
The sense of forging “initial trust”, making the mentees feel immediate support is essential.
“You can have two outstanding individuals within a given field, one a mentor, one a mentee. But without that ability to connect on a basic level and to start engendering trust and build that trust bank, it makes that journey nearly impossible,’’ Jarvis cautions.
“There’s got to be a tacit understanding at the beginning that you’re there to support each other in the process and that there isn’t judgement.”
Support mechanisms. Sounding boards. Trusted allies. Willing listeners.
Mentorship requires many innate characteristics and acquired-though-experience knowledge in order to work.
Still, the benefits of the mentor-mentee relationship runs on anything but a one-way street. The giving-back aspect derived from the process is real, and deep.
“What do I get out of it?’’ Barton muses on that question a moment. “Well, first off I’d say … being able to know I’ve had an impact when we do have these discussions.
“Usually there’s something stressing them that they want to share. So, by end of the call, knowing they feel 100 per cent better about the issue at hand, and having them saying: ‘Know what? If I need to call you back before our next scheduled call, I will’?
“That’s a pretty sweet thing to hear.”
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