I have been involved in paddling in one form or another for the past 17 years, and look forward to continuing that relationship for many years to come. My paddling career began at the Mississauga Canoe Club (MCC) in 1994 when I was 10 years old and, if you will forgive the trite analogy, I took to it like a duck to water. I developed a love for the canoe specifically and spent countless summer hours paddling up and down the Credit River trying to develop my abilities. I was very fortunate to be a member at MCC, as the club has a very strong tradition in the sprint canoe discipline and I benefitted tremendously from the presence of many national and Olympic team paddlers and coaches such as Tamas and Attilla Buday, Kyle Jeffrey, Doug Tutty and Tamas Buday Sr., amongst many others.
Thanks to the influence of such fantastic training partners and coaches and a lot of hard work on my part, I made the Ontario provincial team for the first time in 1999 and would continue as a member of the team until 2003. In the summer of 2002, I finished the summer as the 3rd ranked paddler for my age group in Canada and made the Junior National Team and was very proud to have the opportunity to paddle for my country and win medals against international competition. In addition to competing for the provincial and national teams, I was also a very active member at MCC and won more than 15 medals at the National Championships in various disciplines, including 5 National titles.
After being accepted to university I decided that I would no longer be able to commit the time and energy to sprint canoeing that it required and so I began to transition into coaching and dragon boating. The pinnacle of my dragon boating experience thus far came in the summer of 2005 when I was selected as one of the members of the Premier National Dragon Boat Team that competed at the World Championships in Berlin, Germany, and was a part of 4-medal winning crews at that competition. This experience proved to be a fantastic opportunity for me to expand my knowledge of high-level dragon boat competition and the variety of training methods and attitudes that are required to succeed at the international level.
My foray into coaching began in 2003 when I was hired as the head canoe coach for the bantam program at MCC, a role that I filled for the next two years. I was responsible for organizing and executing a program for a large group of children between the ages of 8 and 14 as well as supervising trips abroad for competitions. I believe this experience in particular will have prepared me for a weekend away at a regatta with CSDC. I have also been active as a coach for the National Dragon Boat Club over the past 5 years and have conducted more than 200 practices during that time for a wide variety of teams (including Sinai Lightning, Hybrid, Phoenix, UofT Occupational Therapy, and a variety of high school teams, Fired Up, amongst many others). Furthermore, I have also become involved in Outrigger paddling and coaching over the past two years and hope to begin racing this summer.
If you have gotten this far, then congratulations, I have just read my little bio again and it’s no DaVinci Code. Regardless, I hope this gives everyone a better idea of my background in coaching and paddling. Although I don’t yell very much in practice or curse like a drunken sailor during races, I am confident in my abilities as a coach. In my practices I focus on hard work and developing an understanding of how to best contribute to the team’s goal of moving the boat down the course as efficiently and quickly as possible. I expect hard work and don’t hesitate to point out when it is missing. I feel that I bring a technical focus to the sport and look forward to working with each paddler to develop their individual skills.