I think it boils down to the intent of the system. For some reason, this country is obsessed with medals, and it's like a international pissing contest. If the intent of our sports system is to create the best athletes, the physical capacity of these athletes is one small component. If we were trying to create incredible people so that no matter where you sit in the hierarchy of who's going to play, from the superstars down to the people who come to the training centre and give up their lives....
I had a teammate who came for six years to the training centre. She lived in Montreal for six years and was from Victoria, and she never went on one international trip. She gave up everything to try to make the team, and she left feeling like she was nothing. If you have generations of people leaving who mean nothing to the system and they want nothing to do with water polo, then you have a problem.
If this system was about creating good human beings—high-performance human beings but great human beings—who could go into any situation in work, education and society, I think you would have very different methods of coaching, environmental methods, and you'd be worrying a lot differently about these athletes.
We had sports psychologists who would work with us, but it was all about how we were performing. They never touched on what bothered me as a native person. It was not even on their radar. That's why I'm doing my master's degree in indigenous studies and kinesiology and looking at indigenous motivation. There's a huge misunderstanding of our motivational psychology.