Mcbride making contact with his lacrosse stick
For a lacrosse lifer like Andrew McBride, this is a simple feat.
Standing in the middle of a gym, firing a ball up to the ceiling, and, with ease, catching it.
It’s a guaranteed attention-grabber for an audience of elementary-school students. Countless kids in Calgary have been captivated by the sight of the ball toss during McBride’s visits.
However, McBride, a tireless and charismatic promoter of his sport, faced a taller task this past September. The room he’d chosen to work was tougher. Much tougher. The Calgary Roughnecks captain and two other National Lacrosse League veterans — Chris McElroy and Creighton Reid — spent a week with aboriginal young offenders at the Justice Ronald Lester Youth Centre, a 16-bed facility in Thunder Bay, Ont.
A Right To Play initiative, in partnership with Ontario’s Ministry of Children and Youth Services, players were on site to inspire and educate, to serve as leaders and role models, to blend life lessons with lacrosse clinics.
First? McBride needed to win over the teens.
Flipping a ball wasn’t going to cut it this time.
“You’ve got to try to break through that hard shell,” McBride is saying the other day. “It’s hard, man. They’re around (other) kids ... so it’s about fighting, picking up girls. You say, ‘If you could be anything, what would you be?’ A lot of them, the first 20 times you ask the question, were, ‘I don’t (bleeping) know. Who (bleeping) cares?’ A hard shell at the start, for sure.
“But once you establish that contact, they very much open up.”
As a pry-bar, a lacrosse stick did come in handy.
Some of the most productive one-on-one sessions took place during practices.
“If I put a kid at a desk, he’s going to be disconnected,” explains McBride. “But if I put a lacrosse stick in his hand and say, ‘Hey, watch this,’ and I show him a trick, then he tries it. Then I can start to engage him, ‘So what’s going on? Why are you in here?
You could see that the kids were a little bit harder, but once you got talking to the kids, playing with the kids … sport is sport ANDREW MCBRIDE
“What’s your family like? What do you want to do?’ It’s great to use lacrosse as a way to bring us together, to have that one common interest, to get that thread going. Then you can dive deeper.
“You could see that the kids were a little bit harder, but once you got talking to the kids, playing with the kids ... sport is sport, whether I’m playing with a Grade 3 student or I’m playing with a 15-year-old kid who’s in there for manslaughter.”
When the boys began to speak freely, they rocked McBride with glimpses into their worlds.
The son of teachers in Vancouver, he could not relate, but he knew that he could offer something — a willingness to listen to these kids from remote communities.
“I had absolutely no idea about the squalor in Canada,” says McBride. “Terrible, terrible situations. Guns, gangs, violence. The sad thing about these kids is they’ve had to grow up so much faster. No having fun and everything is easygoing — ‘I’m going to school in my new coat, with my new backpack, getting Mom to drive me.’ These kids have had to learn lessons the hard way. They learn a lesson by getting into a fight with a group of guys. Or this is their way to learn math — ‘How many OxyContins am I going to sell to equal this amount of dollars?’ ”
Weeks later, McBride, again on behalf of Right To Play, visited Benin, in western Africa.
But it struck him — working closer to home can be compelling, too. He knows the lacrosse initiative would be a hit in Alberta.
He saw what happened in Thunder Bay. Of the 15 detention-centre residents, 11 signed up for the program. Another three joined in progress.
Feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
And a globe-trotting player, who estimates that he’s travelled to more than 50 countries, was forever changed.
“I was really shocked,” says McBride. “It was interesting — and sad — that this was happening in Canada. These kids, who have lots of potential, who are well-spoken … have dreams, have passion. For them not to be able to achieve this in our country was really eye-opening. It completely caught me off guard. I was pretty appalled … just hearing these stories, hearing how these kids lived. It’s easy to say, ‘Oh yeah, there’s communities in need,’ then go sit in front of your big-screen TV.
“So let’s make an impact right here in our own country. It’s a huge issue, a huge problem.”