Champion Chats give kids power to dream big
As an elementary school student in Richmond, B.C., Evan Dunfee remembers being equally impressed by a visit from Terry Fox’s sister and a yo-yo troupe.
“When you’re that age, anyone who comes to your school is famous,” he chuckled. “You’re really excited about it until the next thing comes along.”
Now 29, Dunfee is Canada’s most accomplished race walker, having won a bronze medal in the 50- km at the 2019 world championships. He recently took time away from training to participate in a Team Canada Champion Chat, an integral part of the Classroom Champions program that partners Canadian Olympic and Paralympic athlete mentors with elementary school classes across the country. The aim is to deliver key messages on topics such as perseverance and goal-setting, mental wellness, diversity and inclusion.
“What I really love about these Champion Chats is there is a little bit more longer- term engagement,” said Dunfee. “It’s more than just a one- off, more than just rah, rah, rah, let’s get the kids excited for a week and then let it die out. It gives the kids more of a chance to take in what they’re being taught.”
Classroom Champions provides teachers with a series of four-week lesson plans supported by resource materials including videos that feature athlete mentors such as Dunfee, Neville Wright, Josh Dueck and Priscilla Gagne. All the mentors answered questions from kids during a 45- minute English- language Champion Chat last week that was hosted by retired ice dancer Tessa Virtue. Former Paralympic swimmer Benoit Huot hosted a chat in French, with assistance from athletes Camille Bérubé, François Coulombe-fortier, Hervé Lord and Joelle Numainville.
Dunfee said he would have preferred to speak on goal-setting.
“As a middle- class white male it’s a bit disingenuous to talk about perseverance sometimes,” he said. “But I think my big messaging around perseverance was that the path to our goals isn’t linear. We may take a step backwards or sideways. It doesn’t mean we aren’t still on track to get to those goals. I learned so much more through, for lack of a better word, my failures or my hiccups along the pursuit of my goals than I ever did in breaking records.”
He gravitated toward running and race walking because he was good at it and had instant success. Whenever that waned, he struggled.
“Up until I was about 22 or 23, I was a pretty terrible loser. One of the reasons I got into running in the first place is because I was good at it. I measured success by winning and anything less than winning was failure.
“That created a whole bunch of mental health havoc, especially in training when I was measuring my self- worth based on the quality of every single training session. One day I was invincible, the next day I was useless. It took me a long time to kind of shed that and accept the mindset that was based more on the process. It’s become so much easier to accept those sidesteps or steps backwards.”
With the Tokyo Olympics on the horizon, his goal- setting will be tested.
“I have some pretty damn big goals. I want to win Olympic gold medals and break world records,” said Dunfee. “It’s at a point now where if I don’t do those things, and that’s probably more likely than not, to be honest, that’s not going to mean I was a failure. It just means I had some room to go, but still came so far.”
That’s the kind of message he hoped to impart to the school kids who watched his video and listened in on the chat.
“I would take so much more pride from hearing a kid in 10 or 15 years come back to me and say ‘ hey, I heard you talk one time and you told me to set really big goals and this is the goal I set for myself and look how far I have chased that unabashedly for the last 10 years and look where I am now.’ That would be a pretty cool thing to hear.”
This was the first Champion Chat for Virtue, who came away impressed by her fellow athletes and the program.
“If one kid walks away feeling empowered, feeling worthy, feeling like there is a renewed sense of confidence and maybe they could take on that challenge, they could put themselves out there, they can dream big dreams and set their goals high, then mission accomplished,” said Virtue.