Giving Back with SUP Skills
I am so fortunate that I get to spend as much time on the water as I do now. Especially while I have Paddle Logger along for the ride with me, it’s even harder now to take me off the water than ever before. Believe it or not, my life around water wasn’t always this way. During my childhood I was always outside, but didn’t spend a lot of time near the water, unless it was my backyard pool. When I tell people this, most of them are shocked. They say to me “How is that possible!? You basically spend every waking minute on the water!”
When I was younger, I was always running around in my backyard forest with my brother and sister, playing games, building forts, or going for hikes with my parents. In the summer of 2007 my family and I went to a cottage in Sauble beach, which sits on Lake Huron one of the five Great Lakes here in Canada. One day at the beach we saw these two men paddling on SUPs, and that was the moment I first saw a SUP. I was truly in awe at what they were standing on. When they came out of the water, I ran to them to ask what their crafts were. They said “stand up paddle boards… would you like to try?” and my life has been dedicated to the craft ever since.
That small and precious moment in Sauble Beach changed my life forever. As I continued to grow in the activity of SUP by creating a fundraiser called ‘On Board’ in 2014, then eventually beginning my racing career in 2016, I decided that it was time for me to give back in a more personal way to the sport that has given me an astronomical amount of intrinsic value. For the summer of 2020 I was able to host private lessons during my free time outside of my SUPKids Camp Director role at Paddle Niagara. I was given the opportunity to teach other children, as well as families a range of skills on how to simply stand on a board, to competitive SUP racing. Teaching last summer truly filled my soul knowing that I was given the chance to pass on my passion, just like those men passed on their knowledge of SUP to me in Sauble Beach. It's incredible to think at how many people you may be inspiring when you’re teaching something as simple as learning how to stand on a piece of foam beneath your feet. But even if it’s just one person, that is worth more than 10,000 weight in gold.