Introducing our New Co-host April Fournier (Ep. 8 Transcript and Show Notes)
Strong Athletic Episode 8: Introducing our New Co-host April Fournier
Recording Date: July 2020
APRIL FORNIER
Maybe we should kick off the podcast (laughs).
NADIA KEAN
(laughs) I know. (laughs) We’re like at hour one. (April laughing) We’re just at hour one and we’re like, what do you want to talk about today?
APRIL FORNIER
Uhhh
NADIA KEAN
Good times. Okay, so okay. So, okay. So, um, Let’s kick it off, okay. So, I hate my podcast voice sometimes. Like, I know. I know…
APRIL FORNIER
I won’t look
NADIA KEAN
When I get really excited, well this is my podcast… when I get really excited I just sound so high pitched, like, whatever. Okay.
(Music by the Little Bicycles)
NADIA KEAN
Hey everybody, this is Nadia Kean from the Strong Athletic Podcast and guess who is with me today?
APRIL FORNIER
It’s me, it’s April Fournier, also known as Jumpy McGee.
NADIA KEAN
Oh, yeah, and I guess I’m also known as Smarty Pants.
APRIL FORNIER
(laughs)
NADIA KEAN
Hey April, why are you on the show today?
APRIL FORNIER
I’m on the show today because I’m going to be on the show a lot for Season Two because guess who is the new cohost of the Strong Athletic Podcast?
NADIA KEAN
Is that you?
APRIL FORNIER
Drum roll… it’s me! (laughs)
NADIA KEAN
Yay!!!! Um, thank you so much for agreeing to do this with me this season. I really appreciate it.
APRIL FORNIER
Thank you so much for having me, I’m really excited to share this time with you.
NADIA KEAN
Uh, we don’t even know how long this season is going to last. (laughs)
APRIL FORNIER
We don’t. (laughs) It’s a surprise too.
NADIA KEAN
It’d be funny if this is like Season Two and then there’s never another season because this one just goes on forever.
APRIL FORNIER
For ever and ever.
NADIA KEAN
For ever and ever. Okay, so you and I share a lot of interests in coaching and in essence teaching and then learning in essence being an athlete and being a student. And so you were, just, it was a no brainer to ask you if you wanted to co-host this season because we just have so many shared interests for topics that we could discuss. I’m going to put in a little nutshell why I do this podcast and why it’s important to me that people listen to it and then I was thinking you would do the same thing.
APRIL FORNIER
Perfect.
NADIA KEAN
I know that playing sports has been really important to me as a human and I have always been happier when playing sports. I know that at certain points in my life I’ve quit sports and then I wasn’t very happy (laughs). So, so, um I did retire from roller derby and I do miss it a lot but that was more like a, okay, if I don’t retire from this sport I’ll never do anything else in life and I thought just maybe there’s a couple of other things to do, so maybe I should also start paying attention to what’s going on in the world, so I thought it was a good time to retire. But I did give derby a good fifteen years of my life, which is a pretty long time. So, get this, when I was a kid and people were trying to teach me things there was a really good chance that I was not going to learn from their instruction and then I carried that into sports with me. And so if I had a coach taht was trying to teach me how to do, I don’t know, any number of things, it was highly likely that I wasn’t going to learn from them unless they were coaching me in a very specific way and so then it just came down to if I had natural talent in that sport and that’s what was going to keep me in it. I know that a lot of people have this same experience. Also, pretty early on in my life I had to deal with certain adults that I didn’t like how they treated me and I didn’t like how they taught me and I really found, um, an issue with how they were trying to teach me things. But in their opinion they were the teacher, it was time for me to learn, I was the student. And so, early on I became quite offended if somebody tried to teach me in a way that I found vulgar or rude or offensive and so I carried that with me. And then I’ve also just underperformed in sports. So, like, there’s under achieving in the classroom, and I’ve don’t plenty of that. It took me a long time to finish college because there was so much I didn’t comprehend and there were people who thought it was just like the lack of my ability or my intelligence or I just didn’t want to be there. And then in sports, I underperformed a lot and it really wasn’t until the last six years of my athletic career that I realized that I was incredibly strong and I could produce power, and I was really strong and capable. And I was actually really pissed off at that point because these coaches just devalued my ability and I think that they just took the easy route, which was like, “Uh, i don’t really feel like teaching this kid, so I’m just going to ‘muh… just not going to pay attention to them and if they stick around fine, but if they don’t stick around it’s no skin off my back. And so, I don’t want that to happen to other people, April and that is one of the reasons that I started the Strong Athletic Podcast. And it’s equally for coaches and athletes alike because both need to be good at communicating with one another and talking about expectations and knowing why they’re all there. I know that there are also barriers of entry and reasons that people get pushed out of sports that has nothing to do with their learning style and has more to do with how they look, the color of their skin, the neighborhood that they grew up in, how many parents they have, where they got to go to school, where they didn’t get to go to school, if they had to work a second job, if they had to stop school sport because they had kids, you know there’s any number of reasons that people can… their experience in sport can be impacted. I’m really hoping to invite guests on to the show this season so that we can lea