January 19, 2004

Results of the Western Canadian Team Masters

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The following is an excerpt from the personal journal of the BC Mainland Team Captain Garett Hennigan as he recovers from Post Traumatic Loss-To-A-Big-Island-In-BC Syndrome incurred at the Western Canadian Team Masters held in Calgary on January 14 to 16, 2005.

Patient Journal - Day 4 - Wednesday January 19, 2005 at BC Mainland Psychiatric Institute and Therapy Centre, East Wing, Room 213

The therapy is going well. My small room with the stark white walls is very peaceful with the lovely sunshine streaming through the heavy metal grate covering my one tiny window. It is almost like a..like a miniature squash court. The other patients are quite friendly and the food is good except my repeated requests for my morning green-sludge-banana-apple-protein drink, chocolate chip cookies, Sprite, and potato chips have fallen on deaf ears.

I am on day 4 and all the doctors are very encouraging and say I am making excellent progress. However, the lead therapist says that to make my next step of recovery I will have to go back through some potentially painful regression therapy and relive the events of the Calgary weekend. I have been strongly resisting this approach for various personal and philosophical reasons since it was initially suggested way back on day one when I entered the facility. The therapist pointed out that though I had experienced some significant trauma in the team loss to Vancouver Island over the past weekend there were also a lot of very good times to be remembered, so today I finally agreed to the procedure. The therapist said
I would have to go back to the beginning, recount, and review in writing all the events, both big and small, and "leave no stone unturned" in the quest for a full recovery and to learn a lesson so I can move forward and perhaps resume a normal life again. Well here goes with my journal..

Two seven-player teams from BC participated in this year's tournament which was held at the Glencoe Club in Calgary. The BC Mainland Team consisted of Khoon Chua, Garett Hennigan, Kevin Kydd, Gavin Cooper, Laura Ramsay, Brook Macey, and Sue Wastie. The BC Van Isle Team consisted of Carl Souchereau, L Squash BC Membership Email Subscription Tournament Registration Coaching Clinics Officiating Clinics Liabilitee Clackson, Tom Ralph, Gerry Poulton, Lorrie Baildham, Cindy Brown, and Cathy Clackson.

There were six other teams participating, two from Alberta, and one from each of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Yukon, and Ontario. The Ontario team was there for the second year as a very active participant in the tournament. Even though Ontario is technically not part of western Canada, there team
enthusiasm has made them honorary Western Canadians so we are now ready to officially assimilate them ("Resistance is futile") as a new Western Canadian province.

The various teams flew into a very cold Calgary (-25 C) on Friday afternoon. A small point of trivia: We discovered that West Jet accepts Costco picture identity cards as a substitute for a driver's license photo
ID. At first, we thought it was just another West Jet joke but when my fellow teammates dared me to try it, sure enough there was no problem and they let me board. I can hardly wait to apply for my Costco international passport!

The eight teams were then divided into two pools, with round robins in each pool on Friday night and Saturday to decide who would be playing in the finals on Sunday. The BC Mainland team drew the strong Ontario team for the first round on Friday night. From these early matches came our team encouragement cheer of "Stay with the Program" which meant: Hit the ball soft and deep on the bouncy, high- altitude courts. This chant was used liberally throughout the matches and conveniently circumvented the rule of
"no coaching during a game". Though Gavin and I managed to squeak out five game victories, this technique did not help us enough to win two very close matches where talented Khoon was not able to prevail over a very determined Mike Bertin and Kevin was not able to sufficiently tire out the father of
all energizer bunnies, Johnny Frederick. These unfortunate losses led to an overall 2-5 match loss instead of 4-3 win.

Saturday came very early with a 9 am start against the well rested Alberta 1 team. We were a little overmatched, and lost again. Saturday afternoon finally gave us a win against Saskatchewan where, I accidentally discovered a new motivation technique. While we were watching Kevin struggling in a
match with Bruce MacDonald, the courtside phone rang a foot away from me so I answered it. It was Kevin's wife Sue calling and she wanted to talk to him about some spring holiday travel plans. She said it wasn't an emergency and to have him call after the game but within 30 minutes. I waited until the end of the 4th game to pass on the message. Well, well, well I was astonished at the fire that was lit up under Kevin when he received this distracting news in the middle of the match. He was instantly energized
and was ready to take on the world as soon as the other team members could remove his hands from around my neck and he kept screaming "Why are you telling me this in the middle of the match. You are supposed to be the captain! What kind of coaching is that?" as they pulled him off me. We finally got him back in the court and were able to redirect him to surge back and quickly win the fifth game. This new motivational coaching technique has now been dubbed the "Call Home" technique or in short form
the "E.T." technique. The victory over Saskatchewan set up a 5/6 playoff and a rematch of last year against the BC Van Isle team.

Saturday evening consisted of a team dinner and party at the Glencoe. A fabulous buffet and desert bar allowed the participants to refuel. The BC Mainland team table entertainment consisted of a series of enchanting stories by Brook Macey. One of her stories led to all her team members being very careful about ever accidentally calling Brook any type of derogatory name, now that they knew what happened to the poor boy who called her a less than flattering name back in third grade. There were other stories but these were sealed under team confidentiality protocol rules. There was also pool and darts afterwards where the Sue Wastie and I soon discovered that Lee Clackson and Tom Ralph spend way too many
hours playing darts in the Victoria fire station.

Afterwards, we proceeded on a late night road trip to the Metropolitan Club. On entering it was soon discovered that the packed miniature dance floor would never accommodate 20 exuberant squash players plus Johnny Frederick (who needs a dance floor all to himself) and that "no smoking" had not been successfully implemented so the BC contingent decided to head back to the hotel on the tournament bus for our own party. Just as the bus started to move out we discovered that we had left one of our own, Cindy Brown, behind. Carl Souchereau drew on his military background and informed
us that "a marine never leaves a marine behind" whereupon he conceived a well thought-out extraction plan. In what was dubbed "Operation Stinky", volunteer Brook Macey employed Sidney Bristow-like techniques to somehow leap-frog a 40-person lineup and retrieve Cindy alive with honor intact.

After staying up to 2 am, the 7 am wakeup call on Sunday morning came too soon. The two BC teams faced off for 5th place. Tiger Balm was a "Platinum Sponsor" for the Mainland Team (known as the" Tiger Balm Bending Tigers" aka "TBBT") and we shared a large amount between the teams to ease the aching joints and muscles of the previous two days. The deciding match turned out to be the Kevin Kydd and Tom Ralph encounter. Tom was definitely "in the zone" and managed to come back from down 3-8 in the fourth to win 10-8 with some remarkable gets and winners. It happened so fast I was unable to implement another E.T maneuver to further motivate Kevin as I was sure it was going to 5 games. Even with Lorrie Baildham having to default her match due to a left leg injury, the BC Van Isle Team still won 4-3. This dramatic win by the Island team was foreshadowed by the excellent showing of several of their team members in many of the age categories at the Hollyburn Nationals last May and has ushered in new era and perhaps a shift in the power base of squash in BC. I am sure there will be some
interesting rivalries at the upcoming CanAm championship in April. In the other Sunday matchups, Alberta 1 defeated Alberta 2 for first place, Manitoba defeated Ontario for third place, and I think the Saskatchewan defeated Yukon for seventh.

In conclusion, the above regression therapy helped me to see that my fatal mistake as team captain was to not implement the "Call Home / E.T." motivational technique with Kevin sooner on Sunday. Lesson learned. I will be ready next time. I can now start to move forward.

I would like to thank Ian Bell, Danny Shannon, all the volunteers, and especially Glenn Stark for all their efforts to make the weekend such a success and so hospitable. I hope to continue with my recovery and be out of this facility in time to be able to participate in next year's event which will probably be held in BC or Edmonton.

Best Regards,

Garett

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