Former Canadian national snowboarder Mitch Baker was at Cedar Grove and Sechelt Elementary Schools last week teaching kids the formula to succeed.
Baker was a member of the national team for six years. He provided Canada with several top 15 finishes in World Cup giant slalom and boarder-cross. Since leaving the circuit a few years ago, Baker signed on with the Esteem Team to help inspire and empower children to succeed. The Esteem Team sends athletes from a variety of sporting backgrounds to speak to school children across Canada about their own experiences in sport and what lead them to succeed.
The students at Cedar Grove hung on every word Baker said and laughed along with him as he shared his successes and his setbacks.
Baker told the packed gymnasium about the first time he tried snowboarding at the age of 19 with his friend Jeff and how he fell so many times he actually went to the bathroom to stuff his pants with toilet paper to soften the blows.
"Near the end of the day, Jeff was tired of teaching me and he wanted to go off and do some jumps. So he did and he fell and broke his wrist. I'm thinking I was right, this sport is ridiculous -he breaks his wrist and I'm sitting here with my pants full of toilet paper," Baker told the crowd.
Up until that point he had been an avid skier but never tried the sport of snowboarding, which was relatively new at the time.
After a few months, Baker decided to try snowboarding again and this time he saw some improvement.
"I was improving a bit. This time I had nothing in my pants, which was good. Soon I started to snowboard a little more and ski a little less. By the end of the season I was only snowboarding," Baker said.
Soon Baker would compete in a race, only to come in 29th out of 30.
He decided he wanted to get better at snowboarding and set a goal to make it to a podium finish in the sport."Now I had a goal in mind and I put that goal at the top of a staircase. You can't get to the top of a staircase with one giant leap; you can only get there by climbing the steps. So I had to figure out what steps I had to take to get to my goal," Baker said.
He wanted to practice every day, and to do that he had to move to the mountain. He also wanted better equipment and wanted to find a coach to help him train, which meant he had to get a job near the mountain and save his money for those things.
"I had to make some sacrifices to do that but I knew what my goal was and I was willing to do whatever it took to get there," Baker said.
The first week of practice with a new coach and new equipment, Baker fell and needed to have a cast put on his elbow. "I was pretty disappointed and it would have been easy to give up if I hadn't had that goal that I set for myself and that staircase to climb," Baker said.
Three days later Baker was on the mountain training while wearing his cast, but still he didn't have any podium finishes under his belt.
"I was trying to think if there was anything different I could do, and there was. I could work harder than the next guy, because if you work harder than the average person most of the time, you will become better than that person. So I became the first person on the hill and the last person to leave. Slowly all that extra effort started to pay off," Baker said.
He made it to the podium and even won some races. Then he decided to set another goal to make the national team.
Again with determination and hard work Baker realized his goal, so he set another one- - to win a world cup race. That was something that never happened.
"In six years on the national team, the best I ever got was fourth place. Lots of people say I didn't reach my goal and that I could have done better, but I really felt that I always tried my best and I realized that you can't expect to win all the time. Even when you've done your best, sometimes there are people who are better," Baker said, noting he didn't feel like he had failed.
He talked about his years spent travelling with the team and the people he met and experiences he had.
"Now when I look back, I don't really care about my results. I care about what I did and what I got to learn. And I got to practice some really great skills that I can use now in my every day life to be successful," Baker said.
Those skills are goal setting, sacrifice, determination and perseverance.
At the end of Baker's presentation he asked the students what makes him different than them. Hands shot up and a multitude of answers were given but none were correct until one child quietly said, "nothing."
"That's right. Absolutely nothing makes me different than you guys. All you have to do is find something you're passionate about and build a staircase with the steps you need to achieve it," Baker said.
At the close of the presentation Baker challenged all of the children to come up with a goal and at least three steps needed to get to that goal, then follow through on it.
"Put that goal somewhere you will see it every day and ask yourself, 'What step can I take today to reach that goal?' If you do that now, as you get older you'll have this step-by-step method in place and you'll know what to do. I'm confident you will be successful if you follow these steps and work hard," Baker added.
For more information about the Esteem Team, see www.esteemteam.com/.
