The Butterfly Effect

I’m going to switch gears for a while and write about starting up the Downsview SS Mustangs program. Hopefully it will provide some insight into the long, challenging process of starting a high school football program.

If any of the programs or services which we used to help get DSS off the ground are something you think would help your program, feel free to message or email me for more information.

The Butterfly Effect

(You know how they say if a butterfly flaps its wings in Canada, a hurricane forms in the South Pacific? That is called the butterfly effect – small things happen in the present that create huge, sometimes unpredictable effects in the future. That’s the sort of story this blog post is about.)

In 2003/04 I coached at Western Tech (WTCS) in Toronto. I was a year removed from playing in the CIS, and I was taking my final university course to finish my degree. Translation, I had a LOT of free time between my one 4th year poetry seminar and my night shift job.

That year a young teacher from the Ottawa area moved into Toronto and was teaching at WTCS. He was also helping coach. He wasn’t a ‘football coach’, by his own admission, but he cared about the kids and believed in the importance of the team and the sport of football. We got along well, and he coached our special teams, with help from myself and our other community coaches.

It was a great season – we won a Tier 2 TDSB title and I had a wonderful time coaching.

My young teacher friend from Ottawa moved on after the year (‘surplussed’ as they say in the teaching business) to a different school.

I spent my first year teaching (2006/07) at Richview CI – a TDSB football powerhouse – we won the Toronto Bowl and lost to St. Mike’s in the Metro Bowl play downs. I had the great privilege of coaching high school football deep into November, and teaching at one of the best academic schools in the city. Then, I got surplussed, and was set adrift to find a job at a different school.

Digging through the ‘leftover’ job postings in the Spring, I came across the only English-teaching timetable in the list – at a small school in North York.

Coincidentally, the same teacher from Ottawa that I had coached with at WTCS in 2004 had spent the in-between years teaching at the same school I was applying to. A few phone calls later, and I was lucky enough to have an ‘inside’ reference when I got an interview.

Now, it’s not really possible these days to ‘pull strings’ in a large school board like TDSB, but having someone who knows you to say something positive to their ‘boss’ about you, definitely helps.

My Ottawa-bred friend actually moved into a VP position as I moved into his old school, but we kept in touch and during my first year there, I helped put together a ‘5 year plan’ for building a football program at the school.

Unfortunately, with just over 300 kids and a LOT of issues with attendance, the ‘plan’ never came to pass at that school, but this past Winter I got an interesting phone call from my old friend, at his new school.

He and his principal had taken our old ‘football plan’ and used it as the basis for a very large funding proposal to the Ministry of Education. It was approved. He had enough money, and enough students, to start a football program – all he needed was a coach.

I spent some time discussing the plan with my close friends and mentors, and I agreed to coach the team, regardless of where I was teaching.

Luckily, a number of teaching positions opened at DSS later in the Spring during the staffing process, and I got one of the jobs.

So that’s how my short experience coaching with a person that I didn’t know very well, 6 years ago, helped to shape not only my football coaching future, but my career path as well.

The moral of the story is – you can learn from everyone you encounter, and no matter what you do, where you do it, or how good you are at ‘it’, you should always treat people with respect and try to be a good ‘teammate’ in all aspects of life.

Next up – how to FIND MONEY for your new football program!