Episode 22: Carolyn Trono | Olympian, Leader, Community Builder & Game Changer
1 hour 5 minutes
Carolyn Trono is an Olympian, a leader, and a game-changer. She competed in the 1984 Olympics as a coxswain on the Canadian National Rowing team. Following her athletic career, she decided to be a sport administrator and make the Canadian sport system better. Throughout her career, she has held several leadership positions, including the Director of Coach Education with Rowing Canada Aviron, Sport Lead (volunteer) with the 2017 Canada Summer Games in Winnipeg, and as a systems development consultant with several organizations, including Athletics Canada, Special Olympics Canada, and Tennis Canada. She is the Winnipeg Newcomers Sport Academy founder and is currently the Director of Quality Sport Development for the Sport for Life Society (a national multisport organization). She recently served on Canadian Sport Minister Kirsty Duncan’s Work Group for Gender Equity in Sport.
Carolyn has never shied away from asking tough questions and challenging the status quo. Constantly pushing her colleagues and, by extension, the sport system to be better, change, and the need for it is not something Carolyn is afraid of. While there are plenty of examples of this type of leadership style in Carolyn’s career path, we think it is best demonstrated by the initiative she took in founding the Winnipeg Newcomers Sport Academy (WNSA) in 2016. The WNSA was created to provide opportunities for children who are new-comers to Canada to engage in sport. The program started because, at a gathering with her family, she learned that there was a soccer program for young refugee men aged 18-25 but no programming for kids. Without knowing what she was getting into, she decided to start a program - simply because she recognized that access to sport and physical activity programming is imperative for all children and because she believed in the transcendent power of sport to change lives.
Her work with the WNSA has changed her life, broadened her perspective, and profoundly impacted all the kids, families, and coaches involved with the program. In our conversation, she conveys a story about how one of the boys from the WNSA played on a high-level soccer team in the city. Carolyn went to the last game, telling us:
I went to the last game . . . I wanted to say thank you to the coach, and thank you to the manager and the families for supporting him, and get a picture. And I watched a little bit of his game. As I walked back toward the parking lot, the coach came out, I called to him [to thank him], and he said, “Carolyn, you shouldn't be thanking us, we should be thanking you and Ahmed, because in the time of traveling from his house to the games, and in practice, we learned about the story of his family, the war, how they're all over the place, just how the war impacted them. Hearing his story made us better Canadians.”
So this is the thing - if we don't integrate and include, we're depriving our Canadian children of this opportunity to learn about what is going on in the rest of the world. We can turn off the TV, but when you hear Ahmed’s story, he talks about the bombs coming down in his house and how his family would have to hide in the basement until the bombs would stop. Imagine that? [Many of these] children didn't go to school for years because they would bomb the schools. That's just not real to us. But when you see, when you hear that from a real person, they're telling you this real story, and you go, wow. We [had a program session] at a school recently, and the kids were all out playing. And they're chasing balls, and they're having fun, and it's on a flight path, and the plane starts to come over. It's a trigger, and I didn’t know [this], and all of a sudden, they just stop. And everything goes into slow motion because this is what they hear when they're in Syria in the war zone. And it’s just something that hits you because it's just too easy to turn off the television or not read the article. But this is real because you hear the real stories.
Carolyn reminds us that it is crucial to listen to perspectives and experiences different from our own. She is an inspiring exemplar of someone who takes action when she sees a possibility for a better future. This overview only scratches the surface of the wisdom Carolyn shares in our discussion. Please listen to the entire episode for the complete story
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