Being a Coach and Raising a Family - Patti Howes-Fencing-November 2000

PATTI HOWES, Fencing

In 1988, my husband and I moved to the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia. We had fenced for Carleton University, where I got a degree in communications.

There was very little fencing in the Annapolis Valley. If we didn’t teach people how to fence, we were not going to have anyone to fence with, so we started the Greenwood Fencing Club. There were no thoughts of a coaching career – that didn’t exist in the professional sense the way it does now – we just really enjoyed the sport. Coaching, I discovered, was something I really enjoyed. It kept me involved in the sport, and opened a whole new dimension.

At first it was like a hobby and then I started to cross a line. Why do I do this? Why do I take this so seriously? This is a very demanding lifestyle and yet I don’t want to give it up.

Patti Howes

In 1993, we moved to Winnipeg. My husband is in the Forces and we convinced them to let us start a fencing club. It started with eight fencers and we are now up to around 75 regulars. Over the past seven years, I’ve gone from being a 3M NCCP Level 1 coach to working on Level 4 and I’ve coached at two Canada Games.

I had been running a telecommunications centre. The intensity of that environment is just incredible. It’s a very big, booming industry. The reward is materialistic. At the end of the day, you’d have bonuses, incentives, but did you really feel good about yourself and your day? The reward I feel coming home after teaching three hours of fencing to little kids at summer camp is enormous. In today’s business world, your day begins and ends – maybe it doesn’t end because you’re on a pager 80 hours a week – and do you get that human contact and gratification of being involved in your own life and the lives of other people?

I decided to take a risk, leave my profession, and become a full-time professional coach.

It came to a point where my business world was saying my "hobby" was interfering with my business growth. My happiest place was coaching and the rewards I was getting beyond the reward of a salary. I was really connecting with people and having an impact. This was becoming more and more important to me and I enjoyed it more than the work I was doing in the "real" world.

In 1999, I decided to take a risk, leave my profession, and become a full-time professional coach. I was a recipient of the Petro-Canada Olympic Torch Scholarship, which allows me to go to the National Coaching Institute – Manitoba and do Level 4. So that’s my life. I go to school, run my club, do contract work for various organizations, work for the Canada Games program, and I’m starting to work with high performance athletes. Last year I went to the junior world championships with a fencer I work with.

My husband is still working full time in his position, but he is also taking courses at the NCI. Both of us have a goal of eventually doing high performance coaching. I don’t know how coaches function if their spouse is not in sport because no one really understands your career choice unless they, too, are involved. It’s a career you live. My phone can ring at all hours. I’m always troubleshooting, always handling the next situation, dealing with an athlete or another coach, and that’s what makes it exciting. Every day is new and different with challenges to face. You’re interacting with people, you’re guiding and helping people, and you’re making a difference.

Coaching is about goal setting, about healthy bodies and minds, about people becoming effective. The most effective people are those who can prioritize their lives, achieve their goals, and find balance. You’re always searching for that peak performance, that best ever, and to achieve that, you have to have incredible control over everything around you, and yourself as well. If a coach can help someone to achieve that, that’s nothing you’re ever going to do in the business world.

Whether an experience is positive or negative, it’s very real. This is what makes sport and coaching so dynamic and such a passion. Every day you know you are going to really live and experience what it is to be human at its best, its worst, and everything in between.

I don’t think there is such a thing as normal hours for a coach, but I don’t know that there are for most people nowadays. I work during people’s leisure hours, evenings and weekends. During the day, I do my homework and things like that. My daughters, who are 10 and eight, are very accustomed to our lifestyle.

I started coaching just before I had my two daughters. For five years, I didn’t work outside the home other than coaching, and that was a few evenings a week and Saturdays. My husband had a job that allowed me that option. Once the oldest one went to school, I increased my coaching and eventually returned to the workforce. I was able to pursue coaching because I have a stable and supportive home environment. My husband supports what I am doing so the kids feel that’s the way life is supposed to be.

My parents also contribute to my stable environment. My dad said that if you’re happy in what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. I love that saying and I think about it all the time. How many people can get up and go to work in a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and make people smile and laugh and help someone achieve their goals? That’s a dream job as far as I’m concerned.

My daughters don’t think my wanting to coach is bizarre at all. It is what I do, and this in their minds is very normal. At a store where I buy teaching aids, there was a bulletin listing all the different professions. Coaching was not among them. My passion in life doesn’t yet exist in mainstream society! That’s OK, because part of the passion is knowing you’re doing something that not everybody is willing to do. That’s a really important thing for my two girls to see.

The kids understand that travel is part of my work. It’s not that we don’t miss each other. We go through all of the emotions of being apart from each other, but what’s really important is that they see me happy in what I’m doing. I want them to know that although they are incredibly important to my life, I’m also a human being who has a life of my own outside of them and when they grow up and leave, I will still have my life. I’m mother and I’m coach and I’m wife. I am so many things other than just mother. I want my girls to grow up and know that you can be somebody’s mommy, but you also have to be yourself.