Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hi, it's Steve Indig at Sport Law.
[00:00:02] Speaker B: Leave me a message, I'll get back to you as soon as I can.
[00:00:06] Speaker C: Hey, Steve, it's Dina. You aren't going to believe what just came across my desk. We need to chat. Give me a call.
[00:00:39] Speaker A: Welcome to the latest episode of Sportopia. We're so excited to share our knowledge and have conversations about healthy human sport today.
[00:00:48] Speaker C: We're so pleased to have Wayne McNeil joining us. Wayne is a dear friend and is one of the co founders of Respect Group and Respect and Sport, the technology group delivering bullying, abuse, harassment and discrimination training to sport organizations across the country. Wayne co founded the company with Sheldon Kennedy way back in 2004. It's so wonderful to have you here with us, Wayne.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: Thank you, Deena. Thank you, Steve.
[00:01:17] Speaker C: So, before we get into what we know is going to be a beautiful conversation, Steve, what is coming across your desk this week?
[00:01:26] Speaker A: So, today being a Monday, a recording day, and realizing this episode will go out in a couple weeks, I still wanted to talk about my Friday. I had the opportunity to present before the Future of Sport Commission, which was, in retrospect, a really positive experience. I was a little fearful and nervous walking into a room of a lot of lawyers, which I should be used to, and judges and people.
[00:01:53] Speaker C: Now you know how we feel.
[00:01:54] Speaker A: I understand.
And it ended up being a very positive conversation. And you could tell that the people involved in the commission just really wanted to learn about sport and ways to improve sport and ways to make things better, more efficient, and of course, overall creating a safe and welcoming culture in the sport community. So it was an extremely positive conversation. I think I went 15 minutes over my time and I was just getting started, so I could have gone on, I think, another two hours. One of our team members, Greg Gillooly, also presented last week and spoke about how he thought he could keep going for hours and hours. And now I relate to what he said because it was just such a positive conversation, such great inquiry about our thoughts on the sector and things that could change and improve. And it was just a fun conversation. So I really enjoyed that. I'm happy to go back again and do it all over again if I had to, but it was just a positive experience that I wanted to share. Dina, what's new with you?
[00:02:59] Speaker C: There's a couple of things, but I guess the one I want to focus on is about conversation and the importance of listening as a muscle.
Last week I hosted a workshop for some clients and it was a leadership workshop, bringing a new leadership team together. And in the past, there had been a lot of broken trust. And so people were carrying that level of anxiety and frustration.
And a new leader came in, and she came in with this really open, curious mind and just said, listen, I'm here to learn. I understand that I'm stepping into something that has carried some frustrating experiences for you, and I want to know about that. So one of the things I shared as a tool to help people listen more generously is to make an assumption that at a minimum, 10% of what the other person is going to say is truthful, is factual.
And that's really hard because when we are so angry at someone or we've, you know, our trust tank has been depleted, it's really hard to find 10% that might be true. So it forces us to start to listen differently and to shift the way that we're showing up in the conversation.
And as the three of us know, the conversation that we don't have is the one that creates the division in the first place. Right.
Things are left to fester. And so it's really appropriate, I think, that we're having this conversation with someone that we believe is a dear friend, someone we admire, and someone who has done so much good for the Canadian sports sector.
So, Wayne, you know, I was reflecting on, on when we first met, and it's taking us back a moment, right? I think it was like 2003 or around there. Sheldon had finished his cross country tour and was advocating for this thing called respect in sport. And at the time, I was working with the True Sports Secretariat, trying to. Trying to be more proactive and humanistic in the way in which we engage together. So I remember on a picnic table, we shared a lunch.
[00:05:23] Speaker A: Another lunch.
[00:05:24] Speaker C: Right, Another lunch, Steve. It's where the magic happens. And I was just so taken by the two of you and your vision for a kinder, more compassionate, more respectful future for sport. And I think I remember saying, how can I help? Sign me up. What can I do to be wind in your sails? And I don't think we've looked back. You know, it's been. It's been a really beautiful relationship. So, Wayne, we're just delighted to have you join us. So for those that don't know anything about respect group, maybe just let us know a little bit more about the work that you do.
[00:05:59] Speaker B: Well, it started on a picnic table in Ottawa.
Trust me, Dina, Sheldon and I talk about that all the time. And we had. I'll go a little bit into how we got started, but just reflecting on that Moment. We knew nothing about sport. I mean, yes, I had been the volunteer chair of Alberta Gymnastics. Sheldon played in the NHL. We thought we knew a lot about sport, but we knew nothing about the sport system. And you did. And I remember sitting on that picnic table and you getting noticeably, I guess, excited about what we were talking about. And I remember leaving saying, wow, I think, a, we have an advocate, and B, we might be onto something. But this didn't have much to do with business at all. It really. We were just passionate. And how it all started was Sheldon's situation. As many people know, he'd been abused by his junior coach for several years when playing in the whl. I think he was probably the first male athlete ever to come forward to talk about sexual abuse and what had happened to him. He had a very rough road, and I mean, very rough road with drugs and alcohol and all sorts of things, which he came out of in 2004 when he actually got sober.
And I helped him before that as the chair of his foundation, raise money, work with the Red Cross, inline skate across Canada. So we'd been through a lot by the time we said, hey, why don't we.
Why don't we just go out and train every single coach in this country on bullying, abuse, harassment, discrimination? That can't be that tough. Oh, and, you know, I think we'll.
You know what we should do? We should do it online. And in 2004, e learning wasn't even in our vocabulary. So Sheldon and I would walk into meetings and we would talk about two males. Imagine walking into a meeting of sport leaders to talk at that time about sexual abuse, but really all forms of maltreatment. And by the way, we're going to do this all online.
And I remember.
[00:08:16] Speaker C: I remember weighing, like, the look of shock on people's faces at the first of all, the enormity of what you were proposing. And number two, thinking, what do you mean we're gonna. We're not gonna be together learning in a classroom about these concepts. Like, it. It felt a little bit like, you know, conceiving something that was inconceivable. Don't you think?
[00:08:40] Speaker B: Well, and I remember the discussions we used to have with the Red Cross. They had done everything in a workshop. And I believed, as did Sheldon, that because of these issues, because of the triggers and the trauma that present themselves in a workshop, you're much better off to do this one on one. We call that the safety of the learner. But that was a pretty tough concept to grasp, and so was the technology part of it.
And so we went down the path, and it took a long time to get where we're at. That was 20 years ago. I remember we got our friends in Sport Manitoba. Jeff Natchek and Janet McMahon were the first to come on board and really ruffle feathers in terms of we're making it mandatory for every coach in the province of Manitoba, regardless of what sport you coach. And then we had the same fortunate opportunity with gymnastics, where gymnastics said, we're going to do this for every gymnastics coach in the country. And that was all around 2007.
And Sheldon and I said, well, we've got an NSO.
Should be able to replicate that in about a month. We've got a PSO of every sport in a province that should be easy to take to every province. And we had no clue.
[00:10:13] Speaker C: Yeah. How hard could this possibly be?
[00:10:17] Speaker B: Exactly.
I remember we had a chat with Jeff Natchuck, who was the CEO of Sport Manitoba now or then. He's the Deputy Minister of Sport in Manitoba now. And we went and said, jeff, this is great. Will you be kind of a testimonial for us in Manitoba? We should be able to lock in all these provinces pretty quick. And he said, good luck with that.
So that's how it all started, I'm pleased to say, 20 years later, we're sitting around 2.6 million people that we've certified in our programs, and that's a lot of people. And I would say if we walk into a meeting, even with a school board or a workplace, in some of the other work that we do, there's at least one person out of five that's taken one of our programs. Oh, I took your program. I'm a volleyball coach. Oh, I took your parent program in hockey. It's changed, and the room is much warmer, and the issues have progressed so much that, indeed, the room should be a little warmer.
[00:11:25] Speaker A: I'm going to jump on that word.
Wayne. I want to know. You know, it's been about 20 years since you've had that picnic conversation and the work with Sport Manitoba.
What's evolved? Like, talk about how things. You mentioned some of the roadblocks or the difficulty of getting across the sector. Maybe you can talk about the progression over the last 20 years of where you were and where you are today.
[00:11:51] Speaker B: There's only one word, there's only one challenge. It's called leadership.
And we could have developed the best programs in the world. In fact, at the time, we thought they were pretty good. We could develop the most easy to support and sustainable platform, which fortunately we did because we would have fallen on our faces had our technology not worked. But the really the biggest challenge we had was leadership, telling their constituents, look, we want to protect kids.
We don't want to be a negative program. We want to be a positive program to make people better because they really don't quite understand all of these issues. So let's look at this as giving good people positive tools to be better.
And we needed leaders like that to carry that message and say, you know what, you want to be part of this organization, It's a required program and you're doing it to maintain the integrity of our sport and to make sure that kids that come into our sport every single day have a positive, safe, psychologically safe experience.
And that was not easy.
I also remember this is very anecdotal, but we're still good friends with Jeff Nacek these 20 or some odd years later.
And we saw him a couple months ago and we reflected when they first launched Respect and Sport.
And Jeff said, wayne, I remember you said to me, because I was so nervous about mandating this program on such and such a date and the deadline was such and such a date. I remember saying to you, I'm really nervous I'm going to get bombarded by negativism. And I thought I was kind of putting my career on the line. And I. And he said, what you said to me was, jeff, if you can wake up the day after you've done this and still look in the mirror and say I did the right thing for all the kids involved in sport in Manitoba, that's all you need to be able to say. And he, he talks about it today and said the backlash was absolutely minimal because of the positive spin. I won't even call it a spin, the positive messaging that went out with the program.
So there's a little bit of a history. You've had a similar history, Dina. The 20 years goes quick. I thought I'd always be helping my kids back then and now I've got a 14 year old granddaughter and a 12 year old granddaughter playing soccer and boy, do I have to abide by the teachings that I put out there on the sidelines. I'm, I'm exemplary, right?
[00:14:58] Speaker C: It's so hard because, yeah, you know, we work in sport and all of us are parents. And I remember a few times, right, I'd often co coach and my co coach would turn to me and he'd be like, we used to have this little sign language like zip it. I'm like, oh, yeah, because we're humans, we're going to mess up. And even those of us who, you know, have worked in the space and are advocates for respectful, you know, engagement, we. We are going to mess up. So how do we learn how to apologize when we get things wrong?
Which is actually the space I want to step into now. So, you know, you. You both know I do a lot of leadership coaching, and there's a poem here that I think I didn't know I was going to share this with. It's. It's called Brave Space. And one of our other leadership coaches, Loren and I, we've made a workshop on what does it mean to be brave. So here's what this little poem says. Together, we will create brave space. Because there is no such thing as a safe space. We exist in the real world. We all carry scars, and we all have caused wounds in this space. We seek to turn down the volume of the outside world. We amplify voices that fight to be heard elsewhere. We call each other to more truth and love. We have the right to start somewhere and continue to grow. We have the responsibility to examine what we think we know. We will not be perfect. It will not always be what we wish it to be, but it will be our brave space together, and we will work on it side by side.
[00:16:39] Speaker B: Perfect. Well, maybe I should change it to two words. Leadership and bravery.
[00:16:44] Speaker C: Yeah. And you know, Wayne, as. That's good, Dina, right, as you were talking, because we both know Jeff and Janet as well in Manitoba. And what came to mind, Steve, is it does require that courageous muscle to leap into the unknown. Because back then, it was a mixture of uncertainty and, as you said earlier, Wayne, passion to do the right thing. But there was no map. There was no compass. There was just this kind of belief and energy that we didn't want what had happened to so many, you know, people before to happen again on our watch.
[00:17:22] Speaker B: Exactly. And I like what you said, Dina. We're all human, and we all absolutely cross the line.
I remember my son was a competitive gymnast, and I used to drive him back and forth to his meets, up and down from Calgary to Edmonton and wherever else.
And he did a routine in this competition that I'd seen him hit multiple times on the Palmer Horse, the big equalizing event in men's gymnastics. And he fell off in competition. I'd seen him hit that routine a dozen times in the gym. And so as we're driving back from Edmonton, he was about, I guess, 15, 16. I said, Buddy, like, how did you fall off, Pommel. And he looked at me and said, dad, he knew he fell off. His coach knew he fell off. Everybody knew he fell off. He looked at me and he said, dad, I have an effing coach.
And I didn't say a word. From that point on, I wasn't his coach. It was pretty easy to say, oh, you right. And that taught me.
Taught me a lesson. So we all know the best advice to give our kids is basically, I just love watching you play.
[00:18:44] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:18:45] Speaker B: And that's the extent of it. So have I crossed the line as a sport parent? Absolutely. We all have. But as you said, we just need a few principles that maybe we can apply and from time to time, apologize or zip it should be a T shirt.
[00:19:02] Speaker C: Eh, Steve? Just zip it for board meetings. Just zip it.
[00:19:05] Speaker A: I think we can use that slogan in a lot of different settings.
[00:19:09] Speaker B: Well, like Peter Jensen used to say, we all have emotions. They're not necessarily coming from the best place. We just don't have to display them. Yeah, right.
[00:19:20] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. I love that maybe sometimes the brave move is to be kind. The brave move is to say nothing. And I think that's where we wanted to take the conversation next is to look at your legacy. So, you know, you and Sheldon, before you met Sheldon, you were a successful businessman, you'd done many things, and then you just kind of devoted the rest of. I call it the next chapter of our lives. Right. I don't believe in retirement. It's like you renewed yourself in a different way, devoted to the cause. So, you know, we want to take you back. As you look at the legacy that you and Sheldon have built together, what do you believe has been the most significant impact?
[00:20:02] Speaker B: Wow. Well, in my life, I did have a pre. My life was like pre Sheldon. And after meeting Sheldon, and long before respect and sport, I helped them with many other aspects. And. And the inline skate, we raised money, but that was extremely painful. Up and down, like the road was. So the biggest impact, probably when I bump into people in my daily life and they say, what do you do? And I say, oh, I try to explain it. And they went, wow, I took that program. I wish I'd taken it sooner.
That 24 hour rule as a parent is brilliant. I'm not just using it in sport, I'm using it in my own relationship. Right.
None of it's rocket science, but there's so many people that got something out of the program. And when I bump into them and get positive feedback, that's pretty gratifying. Not everybody Gets that in their day to day.
[00:21:06] Speaker A: No one says that to me Wayne. After I do their bylaws.
[00:21:12] Speaker B: Just let me, let me know Steve. I'll give you a thumbs up fire via bylaw or a policy and I'll just tell you how wonderful it was.
[00:21:19] Speaker A: I appreciate that.
You know, listening to you speak today Wayne, you know, in your pre Sheldon and post Sheldon chapters and then listening to you talk about your kids and your own experience and now your grandkids, you keep expanding and now you're involved in a program called Keeping girls in Sport program. What is that about?
[00:21:46] Speaker B: That dates back a ways and it's kind of a indicator of how sometimes tough the work is that we do. Both of us, right, we launched that probably four or five years ago and now it's just starting to take off with the advancement and focus and amazing emphasis on women's sport. We just announced the Wild a couple weeks ago here in Calgary which is the women's pro team in the nsl which is pretty awesome. So keeping girls in sport is exactly that. It's a program designed to basically educate coaches and parents on how young girls are different than young men when it comes to sport. They have a different response to some exercises on the field that they get injuries at a far higher rate than men. And there's people in there coaching these drills that are actually scary for young women to be doing. We know that different motivations psychologically are there for women than men. It's a very social environment. I see it with my, my granddaughters, right? They like to win. I'll say they like to win but that's not their driver. They're all out there after they lose, high fiving, oh let's go to so and so's house, we'll have a pizza and like it's completely beyond them whether they want to won or lost. And so this program really gives leaders and parents an opportunity to understand the nuances and the difference between coaching men and coaching or coaching boys and coaching young girls. And if we want to keep them in, if we want to keep them engaged because we know how quickly they drop off at a much higher rate than young boys, we better be doing all the right things to lead them and nurture them through their sport experience.
[00:23:49] Speaker A: It's music to my word, music to my ears. Wayne. I have a 13 year old, an 11 year old, 13 year old boy, 11 year old girl and I agree with you, the psychology and the motivation both are involved in, in high performance sport at different, different sports which I think is A really good thing for the two of them. But the psychological, the motivation, the success factors are absolutely different.
[00:24:14] Speaker B: Totally. Yeah.
[00:24:16] Speaker C: Yeah. The. As the woman here and a woman coach.
[00:24:20] Speaker B: Yeah, I remember.
[00:24:21] Speaker C: And I coach both my son in soccer and my two daughters. And I remember. And I've written about this, and I've written about a different way of leading called femtering. You know, we talk about mentoring, which is more. It comes from the Latin root word men. Right. Which means to think.
And. And women, we're just, as you say often, and we're generalizing, of course, because not all women and people, yes, have. Have the similar needs. But what I observed, having coached girls and. And boys, is girls need to bond off the field to perform on it, and boys actually need to bond on the field so that they can connect off of it. And if we can remember that and bring that into the way that we. We parent, the way we lead, the way we mentor and femter, it just. It. It's not like you have to choose one way, but situationally, I'm. I. When I grow leadership muscles, I help people expand their capacity to kind of show up and ask themselves, what does this moment need from me? What does this human need from me in this moment? Exactly. And if we can do that, it's just. It requires a level of, as we said earlier, Wayne, courage and humility. Don't you think?
[00:25:42] Speaker B: Oh, I do, Steve. I'll send you access, free access to the Keeping Girls in Sport program so you can be an even better sport parent. The one thing that really surprised me about this program, I just automatically felt that the female coaches working with the girls got it. And what jumped out at me, because I've heard it so many times, is that the female coaches that were mentored.
Right. Growing up, either male coaches had the same expectations and ideologies as their men coaches. Why wouldn't they? Right? You. You imitate what you've learned. And so I've talked to a few women that have taken our program. They went, you know what? That was an eye opener for me too. And I'm like, wow, I made some bad assumptions about that. So, yeah, it's got a lot of potential. Our friends Marco de Bueno and company at jumpstart are pretty pleased about that program. They were our partners in it, and we were definitely dipping our toe into kind of uncertain. An uncertain place. But we've seen the growth of women's sport, and it just makes so much more sense now to give those people in the early development of girls and young Women, the right tools.
[00:27:08] Speaker C: I really love, you know, the generosity. That's how I receive all the work that you and, you know, Sheldon have done and championed for so long as deeply generous to a system that, you know, if we take people back 50 years when the system was really starting to modernize in Canada, and I've said it before, it was never really designed to do what we're hoping it will do now. And we could stay stuck in blaming people from the past, but if we make an assumption that they did the best they could at the time with the worldview and, you know, the resources, you know, Canada was lauded as being one of the world leaders back in the 70s when it was creating this whole kind of invisible infrastructure to make sport possible from playground to podium. And now, you know, my hope is taking it back to Steve with a future of sport commission that's really focused on how do we make sport relevant and sustainable for future generations. In indigenous, you know, practice they talk about the seven generations.
So if we can maybe hold that up there as possibility, then maybe, you know, inviting you as we start to wind down our time together. Wayne, as you look to the future, what is your biggest hope for sport is, you know, Steve and I call it Sport 2.0. What might be some of what's on your wish list?
[00:28:40] Speaker B: Well, one thing, you know, we, we started with coaches, we went to parents, we went to officials and referees. Get them all on the exact same page because they all have a legal and moral duty of care over our young people, right? So let's give them all good tools and positive ideas to be better at what they do.
Where we're going now, and we've been doing it for probably the last two years, is really focusing on young players, athletes and giving them the tools to create their own environment that's psychologically safe. We're working on a project in Habeen for quite some time called the Respect Charter. And through our partners and recent acquirers, adversity, we're going to be adding resiliency tools to the education because we know that bullying, abuse, harassment, discrimination leads to mental health issues and coping issues. So we're going to be adding to all of our programs, but starting with players through the Respect Charter process and what we're calling respect and sport, plus a lot of very intuitive and effective tools to help young athletes get through the day on their own. So self acknowledgement that things aren't perfect and I might need something to get me through it. So to me that's the next wave and the Feedback we're getting is amazing. We tried to introduce player programming a few years ago and it fell flat because people were, oh, we can't make that mandatory. Your kid's here to have a good fun. Let's not get too heavy handed about this stuff. Well, again, society's ready not to be heavy handed, but we're definitely ready to get players, young athletes involved in the equation, give them tools to be resilient and get through the challenges they have in sport. And that's what I'm excited about right now.
[00:30:43] Speaker C: I love that, Steve. I know you're going to be bringing this one home for us. I just, I'm just so grateful. People can't see us, but maybe they can feel the gratitude that we have in our hearts for, you know, brave people like you and Sheldon, who, despite many of the obstacles and the resistance that was in the system at the time, you kept at it. You had this belief that sport could be better and sport could do better.
And now we're seeing some of the benefits because of your, you know, your brave heart. So thank you, Wayne, for joining us today.
[00:31:20] Speaker B: Thanks, Dina. As you know, we'll never be fully there, but I do believe we are so much further ahead than we were 20 years ago. In spite of some of the, you know, the specific issues and upheaval and so on, there's absolutely no question that progress has been made and perseverance will keep getting us through to the next levels of keeping making it better.
[00:31:52] Speaker A: Yeah, thanks, Wayne. I Love the Sport 2.0 project you're working on and unfortunately in a lot of the work that I do or the legal team at Sport Law does relates to complaint management. And one of the tools we're always looking for is education for kids, for athletes, and it's very challenging to find it. So I really appreciate you working towards that as a resource for sport and all the work that you and Sheldon have done last 20 years. For those of you who want to learn more about respect grouped and respect and sport, we will post the link to your website in the in the episode notes below.
Thank you to all our listeners. We are so grateful to share our vision of Sportopia with you and to.
[00:32:36] Speaker C: Elevate sport as always to have your say in Sportopia. Email us@helloportlaw CA or on social media @sportlawca to let us know what you want to hear about next. Stay tuned for the next episode and until then, be well.
