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 learn more about them and their stories so that other people can just hear about those situations, how they dealt with them, how they couldn’t deal with them. What was in their control, what wasn’t. So, that’s me. What about you April (laughs).
APRIL FORNIER
Can I just say ditto. (laughs) No.
NADIA KEAN
Yeah (laughs) detto.
APRIL FORNIER
I... I started listening to this podcast, um, one, because I’ve been coached by you a few times in my derby career and I think that my learning style clicks with your teaching style. And so, I was very excited for the podcast itself but then I started to find that the podcast content about coaching just paralleled so many other things for me as an educator myself by career and also by managing people and working with teams in my worklife. I just find it really interesting that those same types of strategies and conversations just really translate and cross environments. And so for me, um, as an athlete and as a learner, I have always been, um, one who, I wouldn’t say is necessarily hard to coach, but, I’m very driven to always be the very first and best and when that didn’t happen it was very frustrating for me that my own expectations of myself didn’t match my performance. And the coaches that I’ve had throughout my life, whether it be t-ball or track and field, or softball or even roller derby, um, I haven’t always clicked with their learning styles and their teaching styles. I think that some of that comes back to some of our discussions about expectations and clear communications and knowing what I expect from my coach as a teacher but also what my coach expects from me as a learner and an athlete and how we’re going to find that right combination that gets the best performance out of both of us. I really haven't had many experiences where the magic has happened and I think about, well if I know all of the things that I know, and have all of the resources that I have and I’m still having this difficulty connecting, I think about all of the other athletes that are out there that maybe don’t have the same resources or information, or same access to strong coaches and how many athletes then decide, you know sports just aren’t for me. And then I just know all the things that I’ve gained from sports. You know, confidence, athletic output, I think, I'm very similar to you when I’m not doing sports, my brain and body are not as happy as when I am doing sports. And so, I think all of the skills and all of the things that we get from sports, when we don’t give people the same opportunity to have the same experiences, for me that’s just not okay. I feel like there’s so much opportunity out there for us and sports start so young and that is such a great time while children are developing to instill some of these really great skills so that they can carry those through into their teens and into adulthood and into being professionals. I was an educator by trade, specifically in early interventionism, my whole career is built around looking at skill deficits and looking at skill delays and trying to create strategies to compensate for those and build those up and catch those up so that there are equal opportunities to perform, you know, where the expectations are. So, it’s been fun kind of taking my professional world and professional life and using that in sports and in a coaching way. Because I’ve done coaching for girls with flag football, coaching for roller derby, so I’m working on that skill myself. All of those things kind of coming together and then meshing and making this beautiful, we’ll call it a cake (laughs) for this podcast. I’m really excited. I think it’s going to be super fun, lots of really important discussions and I hope that everyone really enjoys it.
(09:45)
NADIA KEAN
You know, I love the education that you bring to this. What you’ve actually studied and gone to school for, so can you tell our listeners a little bit more about that?
APRIL FORNIER
Yeah. For sure. So I initially started… I did things kind of backward, so kids first, then got married, then went to college and then found a career. But my first stab at college and career was actually in the business world and so I got my undergraduate in business management cause I was working at an insurance company and kind of working my way up the corporate ladder. So I was really interested in the idea of project management and continuous improvement because I just feel like for every system that you have, you can always look at it and look for ways to make improvements. Whether there’s new people coming in and new technologies and new information, it always gives us an opportunity to change and improve and evolve. So that really spoke to me. And when I had our twins in 2008, when I went back to work, when they were about two years old, we discovered that one of our twins was diagnosed with autism. I didn’t know anything about that because my entire life and world had really been, you know, business and teams and management. And so, I just by nature and by personality, I think I’m a life-long learner, I really love to get information and learn new things and so I went into full on learner mode to learn everything I could about autism and how my son was going to develop and what were the best ways to provide intervention and what were the best ways to support him so that we could compensate for the things that he was lacking. At that time he was nonverbal, so he didn’t have any words. He was self injurious, meaning when he got frustrated because he didn’t have words, he would engage in self harm. So, he would hit himself in the head or he would hit his head off the floor or off the wall or, you know he would scratch his arms or he would cry because he didn’t have the language to tell us why he was frustrated. And then he really just didn’t have a lot of social connection to his twin or really to anyone in the family, and so it was hard to engage him in play and hard to, you know, really get into his world. He was very, kind of, isolated. And so we were able to engage with our local early intervention agency to get some help. I didn’t really know what to do outside of that. You know, you can read all the books you want, but until you see someone really demonstrate what they mean when they talk about, you know, teaching your child how to get speech skills, the book doesn’t even give the work justice. And so, we had someone come to our house five days a week and sit on the floor with us and with him and show us, here’s how we can get him engaged in play, and here’s how we can work on just gaining his attention. And here’s how we can interrupt some of those behavior cycles that result in a self injury. And month by month we started to see our little boy emerge from this, you know, world that he had been shut off in; and just that transformation, for me, was incredible and revelatory. And he then transitioned into a special education preschool where he started in a very small classroom with one to one support and we continued to see this evolution for him where, you know, he started to have, you know sentences. And he started to have spontaneous play and he started to do life skills for himself. I think until you have seen, you know a typically developing child compared right next to a non- typically developing child, you don’t really understand how magical it is for a kiddo to say, I want juice. Or see them play with a toy functionally instead of just like banging it against something. So, we had kids prior to that, and so we kind of knew the things that we were missing out on, so I think that definitely was hard for us to watch him struggle so much. But then we saw what this early intervention and special education did for him and then he was able to translate into a regular kindergarten classroom with some pull out with extra supports and all of that. But he was still able to be around his peers and learn by watching and modeling the things that they were doing. And so, it was when he was transitioning into kindergarten, I had one day when I was in my office, I was managing a team of 22 people and we were just responsible for like incoming images for insurance claims and for attaching them to claims and then they move on in the process. It really was truly a widget in this machine, and it is important work, so I don’t want to discount what people do, but it just felt like I was not a fit for that work. And I just really felt called to go learn more about this thing that changed the trajectory of my son’s life. And so, I ended up going back to school to get my Masters Degree in Early Childhood Education and then went to work in At Home Behavior Services and then worked in a special education preschool and then eventually ended up working for the agency that did all of this work for my son. Because I just felt like one of the disconnects in that whole process for us as parents was that we didn’t understand the speak of special education and legal terms and some of the jargon that comes out and so we felt very helpless through a lot of that process, not understanding the terminology and not knowing if what they were proposing was even right for our kiddo. We just had to trust the system that they were going to do what was best for him and I didn’t like that experience and I knew that for us we were college educated parents, you know, that were still in an intact family, that were relatively financially okay. You know, we had secure housing, we had food, we had secure employment. So then I thought about all of the other families that… we live in Portland, which is the biggest city in southern Maine, and the most, you know, diverse city and so I thought about, what about all the parents that English is not their first language or they have recently claimed asylum in our city from a different county and this is a completely new culture for them. Or they don’t have both parents around. Or they don’t have the same access to resources or finances or secure food or housing. What about those parents going into this process and who is looking out for them and who is advocating for them and who is making this understandable so that they understand what they’re agreeing to, and then know exactly what services their kiddo is going to get? And so in becoming an administrator, that was my focus, is being the friendly voice and the friendly face on the other side of the table that’s slowed the whole process down and said, “So I want to make sure you understand what we’re going to do for your child and I want to make sure that you also understand what they’ve been diagnosed with and what questions do you have and what resources can we help connect you to?” Because we do know that it’s been done if you want a child to succeed you have to make sure that they have all of those foundational needs met, so that they have secure food, they have secure housing, they have a safe place to live and then they have access to education. So education is kind of that next level thing if you want them to be available for education you have to be able to meet those other needs first. And so, helping families in that manner, instead of “Okay, you’re my next thirty minute meeting. We’re gonna knock out all these things, I need you to sign these forms. Okay, cool, now I need to get on to my next meeting.” There are absolutely two different approaches you can take, I opted for the one that I thought would get the best results for that child and that family and I feel really good about the hundreds of families that I worked with before I moved into the new role that I have now. But I think being an educator has always been a little bit of who I am, just as a person. I’ve just now done a lot of school (laughs) and a lot of training and a lot of learning to refine that craft so that I’m not only educating by career and this special education field, you know, I’m doing that in the Team Indigenous work that I do. I’m doing that in the diversity and inclusion work that I do with the WFTDA, I do that right now as I’m getting ready to run for City Council right here in Portland, educating the public so that they understand what their resources are that are available, what their options are for when they’re casting their votes. How the different candidates differ. So, educator has always been a part of who I am, and that just funny enough translates into just another way of being a coach. So, yeah, that’s what I do. (laughs)
NADIA KEAN
I like that. Like, I get a little nervous, because I don’t have that background in education. But I definitely understand the desire to learn more about your son and how y’all are going to approach the situation, and so your like, “Why don’t I just go and study it because I’m going to be studying it no matter what, so like, might as well get another degree and then help people through the same process.” You know?
APRIL FORNIER
(laughs) Exactly. (laughs)
NADIA KEAN
For me in sports it’s like, “This was good, this wasn’t good, I want to help people through the same process.”
APRIL FORNIER
Yeah absolutely. I think when people choose... there’s always that quote, unquote “Calling” and I think a lot of people follow or answer that call because there was some situation that mobilized them, that said, “Oh, I remember how I experienced this and I want to change that for somebody else, so now I’m going to go and become a part of this process so that the next person that goes through this has a better experience than I have. And I have the chance to make that better.” And you know, it could be from working in a business office to going into education, there’s just so many different ways that we’re able to coach and improve and teach and educate, it’s not just sports and it’s not just education and it’s not just business and it’s not just being a parent, it can be all those things combined.
NADIA KEAN
What’s your opinion on calling coaches the teachers of the field? Do you find that there are more similarities between a coach and a teacher then there are differences?
APRIL FORNIER
Oh, absolutely. It’s one in the same role, really. You know, coaches have to do research so that they know what they’re going to train or what they’re going to teach their athletes. Teachers have to do research to know what they’re going to, you know, train and teach their classroom So it’s a classroom, but it’s just a classroom in a non-traditional sense.
NADIA KEAN
It’s interesting because sports, of course, are competitive, and so, when the coaches, when they’re teaching the same exact content to the athletes on their team, they’re also trying to sort out how to beat everybody else at it. (April laughs) And I feel like in education… in education there are schools that want to be like the best schools, but it feels like the approach isn’t really like, we want to beat everybody else at this. But, am I wrong, or is that part of education, wanting to be the best school, wanting to be the best teacher?
APRIL FORNIER
There is a different win that you get in the education setting. So like, for… in special education for example, I’m not trying to do better than another student or get better results, but what I am trying to beat is whatever is holding them back. And so it’s not necessarily competition against others, it’s competition against whatever that deficiency, or whatever that delay, or whatever that challenge is. So it’s still a competition.. I have a kiddo in one of my classrooms right now who when she started our program she was selectively mute. And so selective mutism is actually a form of anxiety, it’s not actually a speech and language disorder at all, it has to do with anxiety, so we weren’t really sure, it’s hard to get a three and a half- four year old to explain why they’re feeling anxious or even recognize that what is going on is anxiety, and so we have been working with her consistently for a better part of a school year just to get sounds and speech and have her feel comfortable enough and safe enough so that she’ll use her words at school. Because she feels comfortable and safe enough to do that at home. So that’s the selective piece of when she’s going to talk, and what we’ve seen and what we were trying to beat, if you will, that feeling of not being safe, or not having an environment enough for her to share. And so it was manipulating the classroom and trying to create really supportive situations so that eventually we started to get little bits of speech, you know, single words whispered. And then we started to get sentences whispered and then today she sang, “Five little monkeys jumping on the bed,” yelling into the screen where her speech therapist was because she was just so excited to say, “No more monkeys jumping on the bed!” But, when you hit that, it is the exact… I equate it to the same thing as if you were the hitting coach and you see someone you’ve been working with who couldn’t connect with the ball, you finally see them hit that single or double home room. You’re like, “We did it! We did it!” and it’s like a very similar feeling and we didn’t beat another team, but we did beat what was holding her back. And I think there are so many similarities more than differences between coaching and teaching in the classroom.
NADIA KEAN
I agree with that, like I do think that coach is just another word for teacher. For a while I was questioning if I should teach people how to coach since I didn’t go to school for it.
APRIL FORNIER
Right. (laugs)
NADIA KEAN
And if it was just basically egregious to assume that I had enough information to call myself an expert, but I think i finally came to terms with the fact that I have all the experience of how not to be coached and how not to be taught and I did so poorly in school because I couldn’t figure out how to navigate school. How to stay in school, not get kicked out and how to function as a student. I’m just incredibly intrigued by just learning how people learn and people don’t learn. I think that’s probably the most important to me is how people don’t learn and so whenever I coach people I just assume they haven't learned anything and that I need to teach them how they learn, rather than just teach them how I want to teach. Cause I think that those are very different.
APRIL FORNIER
Well, and I think that’s super intuitive of you because what I have experienced just in becoming an educator, both for educating adults…. So when I worked in the insurance industry I got trained in how to train others on content and systems and processes. And as an educator now, have been trained how to train and teach children with disabilities. But one of the first things that has been at the start of every train the trainer or teacher training that I’ve done is some sort of, whether it’s personality styles inventory, learning styles inventory or communication styles inventories, to get more information about the learners. And that’s like step-one, learning how your group learns, so that you as the instructor, can adapt your instruction. So you have people that do really good with auditory teaching, and you have others that are like, “No, I need to have all of these modalities combined or my brain is not going to pay attention.” Or you have others who are just “Give it to me, show me what I have to do and I can copy what you do.” So I think that’s super intuitive that you need to know a little bit about your learners before you start with “This is how you dox, y and z.”
NADIA KEAN
I feel like a lot of people don’t know how they learn. So when I ask athletes if they have a request for how I coach them it’s almost like nobody has ever asked them that before. You know? And when you’re coaching fifty people you can’t necessarily ask everybody exactly how they want to be coached but I don’t know, I think that there’s a way that you can juggle it so that you’re trying to speak to everybody. So, in athletics I think a lot of times if someone is good at running they become a running coach, but in education if someone is good at reading, they don’t necessarily become a reading teacher. You know? But in athletics we tend to find someone who was good at the sport and then ask them to coach it, and that’s not necessarily the best means of finding educators.
APRIL FORNIER
Right, right. Yeah, I think it’s who has time to do it and who will just say, “Yes”. (laughs) I think… and if you look at youth sports, my kids have gone through t-ball and little league and football and all the sports in between. But consistently with all of these sports, it’s always someone… whoever the lead director is, sends out an email to all the parents and says, “Okay, so we have five teams, I need five coaches,” just hoping really with all of these athletes that have signed up there are five parents that are willing to step into a coaching role. Not necessarily that the parents are qualified to go into that coaching role, but as long as they can pass a fingerprint check and they can show up semi-consistently to the field to lead practices, then they get the go ahead to coach. But when you think about child development and how much of us is influenced and shaped and molded before we turn ten, that’s a recipe for disaster. (Laughs)
NADIA KEAN
(Laughs) I know, I was just thinking of how many kids were fucked up by their coach? Like how many kids have coaches that just like made them feel horrible about themselves and then they never returned to sports but they also ended up with a horrible sense of self or a horrible self confidence and it’s all because “Little Tommy's” dad was able to volunteer on Tuesdays and Thursdays and nobody else’s could. You know? And “Little Tommy's” dad has anger issues. (Nadia and April laugh) Like, uh… we’re laughing, but it does happen.
APRIL FORNIER
It does.
NADIA KEAN
It is funny because we wouldn’t do that in education, you know, it’s not like, raise your hand if you’re able to teach these kids Monday-Friday. It’s also because sports is extracurricular, so it’s not something that’s considered mandatory.
APRIL FORNIER
Right. And it’s definitely…. For those listening it’s not to discount the parents who volunteer, I have been that parent, my husband has been that parent. And we have lots of friends who have been that parent. So if you step up and do that we are grateful for you. Absolutely.
NADIA KEAN
Yes, I’m grateful too. (April laughs) I’m also grateful. I don’t have kids but I’m grateful.
APRIL FORNIER
But I think it’s also recognizing that when you do step into that role, it’s more than just, “I can show up on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 5:30.” There is a little more preparation and work that should go into stepping into that role because hopefully as you’re listening to this you start to think maybe to yourself, “Oh, there are things that these kiddos can take away from our experience together, and I as the adult and as the coach have the opportunity to decide if that’s going to be a really positive and great experience that makes them want to come back and do this again,” or this is kind of an, “Okay, my kid now has to be dragged to this sport on Tuesdays and Thursdays because they’re not having any fun.” Adults out there, you have the power to control that and if you’re not sure how to be a coach or how to do it, there are lots of resources, hopefully this podcast (laugs).
NADIA KEAN
Listen to the podcast.
APRIL FORNIER
That will help you grow those skills so that you can be confident in stepping up. Maybe more than once, and maybe you find that you love it and you want to keep doing it too.
NADIA KEAN
Yeah, and also this podcast is really just about communicating better with others, getting your point across, trying to keep relationships intact, learning how to learn from others, learning how to teach others in a way that’s not offensive. And really, you know in a lot of ways, it’s just like lessons for life in general, just under the disguise of how to do it on a sports team. So April, there’s so many things that interest me in regard to athletics and athletes. One thing that I’m interested in is all the effort that is put into getting kids into sport and how little effort in putting adults into sport, or getting adults into sports. And especially women.
APRIL FORNIER
Right, right. I think that’s also interesting for me as well because we see there’s such a huge push, as you drive around our city here in Portland, when you get close to August, all of these signs go up around the city for youth football and youth soccer and get your kids... and there’s emails that go all over the place and there are social media posts to get your kids signed up for these things. But then, beyond high school there’s not really that much. There’s some recreational leagues, adult kickball and any of the really competitive (sports) baseball, soccer, or basketball is really more male dominated, there’s not really many women’s sports out there, which I think is again why roller derby was really appealing for me. But then again, another thing that I’m excited to talk about, as we talk about the different topics on the podcast is equity and having the resources to access all of these sports. And that’s something for us as a family and as parents. You know, we have four kids, so if our kids wanted to play football and hockey and baseball and…. We couldn’t afford it. There’s no way, and so there have been times when we have applied for the different youth scholarships because while $180 might not seem like a barrier to some families, to other families, it’s like, “No, my kid can’t play. I can’t come up with $180 to fund this.” and so, looking at not only the youth level, but the adult level, what are some of the barriers that get thrown up to access the sport that prevent us from having a larger reach to some of our very important community members that couldn’t really benefit from that community. So that is something I’m definitely very interested in talking more about.
NADIA KEAN
Yeah, absolutely. Sports, they’re expensive. You know? Roller derby is very expensive, just to get a good decent kit, you have to drop quite a bit of money. And when I was a coach, I wasn’t a cheap coach to bring out. You know? Like you had to invest money to bring me out and I think a lot of sports are the same. You know? And I think that a lot of sports are the same.
APRIL FORNIER
Right. I remember getting my first skate package quote and I had no grounds for comparison really. I was just like, cool I’m going to go do this thing and it’s going to be great and I think I have two hundred bucks, it’s going to be fine. And then getting that first quote for all of the gear and the skates and the wheels and it was just like almost I want to say between $500 and $600 dollars, and I was like, “Oh my god, my husband is not going to sign off on this,” (laughs) and of course he’s been incredibly supportive and seven years later I’m still doing derby. But, at that initial entry into a sport, if that’s the price point, there are people that are not going to take that first step because it’s a big investment in something that you’re not sure you love yet, and you’re not sure you can do and then there’s also the time… quote-unquote “time cost” that we don’t always talk about, but that’s also something that dictates whether or not you can advance in this sport to different levels.
NADIA KEAN
One of the podcast episodes we’re going to have obligations versus motivation and people saying to their teammates “You’re not motivated enough” and it’s like (laughs), “No, actually I just have all these other obligations in life, and I really do love this sport, but…”
APRIL FORNIER
Kid ’s birthdays, tournaments...am I going to give that opportunity to my kids so that they can do that stuff and then trying to find that balance, that’s really really tricky.
NADIA KEAN
That is really tricky. I am really intrigued by that because I also know that, I still quote you, one of the best things I’ve heard you say is that, “Sports transcends language,” and that you can just play a sport with people and you don’t need to know how to communicate with them and I just love that. And I think that sports also has the capacity to bring people together and it’s also shown it has the capacity to bring people together and also help to make meaningful change happen. If you don’t have access to that or you’re missing out on it, or at some early age some dumb-ass told you you were shitting at it so you never tried it again, those are all barriers to being there.
APRIL FORNIER
Yeah, for sure. If you, you Nadia, and listeners, have not seen the new Nike ad, you have to watch it because they actually fuse different sports together in a split screen and it’s every sport and every athlete and it’s absolutely beautiful, but it just talks about that same concept- sports transcends language and culture because we as a global people are going through something very real together that’s impacting all of us. And just the message that this sends is really, really powerful. So if you have the chance, definitely watch it. I have conflicting thoughts about Nike themselves, but this is a really beautiful piece that I would absolutely encourage people to watch. But if you think about right now, I think in the first WNBA game, when they started to play the anthem, the players started walking off the court, stayed off the court until it was done as a way to protest that they still haven't brought Breonna’s killers to justice. And so I think there are just so many ways that, gosh, if you didn’t have access to being part of that movement, there’s just so many ways that now that’s impacting social change, which is amazing. But then, when you put those barriers in place where people can’t experience that, we’re losing so much in lots of different communities because we can’t make those connections.
NADIA KEAN
And also, where sports teams are the most prevalent and where kid’s teams are the most prevalent, where they aren’t. Where the fields are nice even. (Nadia and April laugh) Where there’s actually basketball hoops on the backboard or where the parks haven’t been replenished in years and nobody cares.
APRIL FORNIER
Right, right. And that’s… even here in Portland, there’s a really big equity issue that we’ve been battling in little league forever. The girls field is one of the worst fields, just from an accessibility standpoint, from a field maintenance standpoint, a safety standpoint, and so it’s always sort of the afterthought for all of the fields and that was frustrating for me for many years, being on the board and also having kids that went through. And, that’s that way, I think, pretty consistently across, if the girls have a field at all, they’re supposed to by law, but when you look at all of the different places where girl’s sports are played it’s not often where all of the money is spent. And the girl’s fields don’t get the lights that cost tens of thousands of dollars, and they don’t get the really nice field maintenance, they don’t get the built-in bathrooms and snack-shack. And that’s a huge equity issue because if you’re playing in really shitty conditions are you really going to stick with it when you see, “Well if I look across the way here, there’s this beautifully manicured field that gets mowed every other day. The lines on the field are beautifully drawn. There’s really comfortable bleacher seating for all the parents, there’s parking… and our field has tumbleweeds and dust and you can kind of see where things are supposed to go…” but it’s that equity piece that, again, from youth, all the way into adulthood…
NADIA KEAN
Yeah, just getting us ready. (April and Nadia laugh)
APRIL FORNIER
We’re just setting your expectations low just so you know what can happen. I think it was, there was a college here in Maine. The girl’s lacrosse or girl’s field hockey… it was like a playoff game at one of the universities and because the football game was starting three hours after their game, they closed the fields and wouldn’t let them play. And a college had come from out of town, and they cancelled their game because it was adjacent to the football game that was going to happen hours later. And even after there was national outrage that this happened, there was like a half apology from the university athletic director, and it’s like, if that’s the way that women are treated at the collegiate level, think about what happens leading up to that to think that that’s okay, and what happens after that to think that that’s okay.
NADIA KEAN
Yes, absolutely. And if they’re getting little girls used to the fact that their fields aren’t kept up like the boys, and then they try to have this massive game in college and they’re told, you can’t even play yours because we’re having a football game across the field...
APRIL FORNIER
In three hours...
NADIA KEAN
That’s just grooming women to take a backseat, and then that gets into gender politics. And then let's also talk about the little boy’s and little girl’s team. How about those nonbinary kids. And at a young age and they’re already being told, choose your gender identity so that you can play ball. There’s so many topics for us to discuss this season, just to dive into and see how it impacts people, how it impacts athletes.
APRIL FORNIER
That’s why this season will go on forever. (laugs)
NADIA KEAN
I know, Season Two will last for a very, very long time. April I feel like every single time we sit down and talk about some concept we just end up two hours later, like we’re talking about, I don’t even know what.
APRIL FORNIER
I think you’re right.
NADIA KEAN
So, I’m excited. We also want to hear from y’all. What do you all want to hear about, or what stories do you want to tell, or is there a story happening in your town and you think it needs more exposure. Or is there a coach or an athlete that you think we should talk to or an educator or somebody that’s a specialist that you think we should learn from. And also, there are some topics that April and I want to tackle but we aren’t the experts on it and we also don’t know the experts on it, so we’ll probably be reaching out to y’all, our listeners, to see if you can help us find people that can discuss these topics with us. We’re on a zoom call because I’m in Vancouver, BC and April is in Portland, Maine, so obviously we’re no where close to each other, and April, have you heard the seagulls on my end this whole time?
APRIL FORNIER
I did hear the seagulls on your end.
NADIA KEAN
Oh my gosh. We have a seagull colony on the apartment complex across from us and I’ve started wearing earplugs because they start to do their seagull stuff really early.
APRIL FORNIER
Seagulls get loud.
NADIA KEAN
Oh yeah, y’all have seagulls too.
APRIL FORNIER
Yeah, yeah. We are like literally on opposite coasts. I don’t think… well, maybe in North America we could get further apart, but we’re pretty far apart.
NADIA KEAN
Yeah, we’re pretty opposite. I wonder what latitude we’re on and if we’re on the same latitude?
APRIL FORNIER
I guess now we’re going to have to research that.
NADIA KEAN
Another thing we have to sort out. Yes. Yeah, I’m just really excited.
APRIL FORNIER
Me too. Me too.
NADIA KEAN
And I’m happy because it seems like all the people that listen to the Strong Athletic Podcast really are intrigued by what we talk about and they really have the desire to learn information that they don’t think, you know, they don’t think about everyday or they don’t hear about every single day.
APRIL FORNIER
Absolutely, I definitely have found, like I mentioned, part of what I got out of this podcast translated into other aspects of my life, that was an unexpected bonus. I didn't really expect for the things that I learned as I listened to translate into things that I could implement at work. With teams working at work. So, yeah, lots of good stuff.
NADIA KEAN
I love that. It’s almost like a freebee, like when you’re reading a book on one thing and then suddenly you’re like, “Oh my god, this applies to this other thing!”
APRIL FORNIER
Connections (in a sing-song voice).
NADIA KEAN
Connections (in a sing-song voice). (April laughs) Yes, I was gonna say something… (Nadia laughs)
APRIL FORNIER
This is what happens when it’s two hours later. What was that thing…?
NADIA KEAN
I know. Oh yeah, okay, so one of the original intents of the Strong Athletic Podcast was to help you become a better coach. We are going to continue to do that, but right now we’re just kind of taking a break from those actual coaching concepts that are like, “Try it this way,” or “Don’t try it that way,” because most likely you’re like the rest of the world and you might be listening to this live in 2020 and there’s not a lot of sports going on right now and not a lot of coaching going on. And so right now we’re going to tackle some bigger questions and some bigger concepts that we’ve been thinking about, and thinking about how they relate to y’all the listeners and then, we will continue-y’all… to bring y’all… I think I just made continue and y’all into one word. “Continuey’all.”
APRIL FORNIER
Continuey’all.
NADIA KEAN
Continuey’all. We will continue to bring y’all actual applicable ways to coach and to be better at being coached, but for right now we’re going to step away from that for a second just to tackle some other things.
Music by the Little Bicycles starts to fade in.
APRIL FORNIER
I love it, I think it will be great.
NADIA KEAN
Okay, so we’re gonna say bye to y’all, but then April and I usually stay on for a minute and we say bye to each other, so, we’ll stay bye to y’all first (April laughs), and then we’ll say bye… to… each other (Nadia laughs). Long day. Friday at 8 PM.
APRIL FORNIER
Bye friends.
NADIA KEAN
Bye, I’m super excited. I hope you’re as excited as I am about April being on Season Two.
APRIL FORNIER
Woohoo!
NADIA KEAN
Woohoo! Thanks for tuning in, y’all have a great day, we’ll talk to y’all later.
Music by the Little Bicycles starts to fade out.
NADIA KEAN
Hey y’all! This is Nadia again. I want to tell you that the Strong Athletic Podcast is brought to you by Strong Athletic, the company that empowers athletes and coaches within sports. Find show notes, show transcripts and more information about our podcast at www.strongathleticpdocast.com. Go to www.strongathletic.com to see our selection of t-shirts, hats, fanny packs and stickers, to read our latest blog posts and to find out more about us. Plus, use the code “podcast” all lower letters to get 10% off of everything in your cart the next time you shop. Thank you so much for listening joining the Strong Athletic Movement. We’ll see you the next time.
