For me, it's a cornerstone for a lot of things. For example, I'm not a big gymnastics person. I was a basketball person, and I could never get gymnastics when I started in that sport. Then I realized that these little kids who were eight, nine, ten years old were flipping and doing things on beams that we would be very nervous to do. I like my feet firmly on the ground; they don't. So all of a sudden I realized why it was so important to them to stay in it.
The thing we found, too, is that the concentration level in sport is so high that it transfers to other things. It transfers to school. We've had results from schools that have shown us that students—whether they were good, bad, or indifferent—became better once they took up the sport and stayed in the sport longer, because of the concentration level.
I've found that even in my post-university career. I wasn't sure a lot of the guys would make it in business—they were sports guys and they had a dubious university career, I would say, or study habits—but because they played sports and they formed a few variables that weren't taught at university, they became pretty good business guys. They knew how to work with people, they knew how to work through things, they had common goals.
I come from a team sport. I always believe you're as smart as the people you hang around with. You're as good as the people around you who are working with you, so I like to build teams. I know nothing about gymnastics, yet we have one of the strongest gymnastics clubs in North America. But I know business and I know coaching, so I go out and hire good gymnastics people, and because I can run a business, I can afford to pay them. So there are ways around it.
Sports is a cornerstone. There are four key sports, gymnastics being one, and track and field being another. There's a sport like swimming. It's a lifetime skill.
You can always take something from sport and bring it into your everyday life, and I think that's why Canada and other countries are so enamoured with sport. It's not necessarily because of the unbelievable skills that people possess. I think it's the other things we know about that sport can do for people.