“I got into paddling when I was quite young, 8/9 years old. My mom was a dragon boat paddler, she signed me up for the summer camp at the Cascades Canoe Club. It was the 1st year they offered sprint paddling programs. It was a really small group of 10 kids , 5 boats, makeshift sort of program. We had a really awesome coach at the time, her name was Julie. She went on to work for Canoe Kayak Canada for a few years so she was a really good coach. She introduced us to the sport, got us involved in it.
We were the first group of athletes that started the club with Julie, and over the years it grew to be bigger and bigger. As the club grew, as we started to love paddling more and more, as we started to see more success, that’s when the younger athletes and paddlers from the community started to join the Sprint program. my older siblings and I were the 1st high performance group at the club which was really cool. We groomed the path for a lot of younger paddlers and a lot of the high performance athletes there at the club now.
As I got older we started to get more competitive into the sport, we started to race at Provincials, Nationals and race some National Team Trials. I loved the sport for a really long time, my goal was to make the Olympics, my goal was to make the National team. Unfortunately, at 17 years old I dislocated my shoulder in the 2011 season. I had to miss Junior National Team trials that year which was a pretty big set back for me because that was one of the years where I could’ve made it.
I was training really hard to make Junior World’s that year, I dislocated it a month before my Florida training camp where I was spending 5 weeks in Florida training in the winter so that sort of derailed my season a little bit because Florida wasn’t as effective as it could’ve been. I didn’t get to train as much as the other athletes going to Florida. I ended up missing trials because I wasn’t ready to race at that point. Throughout the summer I got better and better, I ended up getting 2nd at Nationals that year in C2 200m, which was a huge accomplishment for our club at the time. That was the 1st year our club won a medal at Nationals because we were such a young club. Me and another girl in C1, we podiumed. That was a huge accomplishment for the club and the community as a whole. It sort of put Cascades Canoe Club on the map of Canada a little bit which was pretty cool.
Next winter I trained really hard, it was my last year to make Junior Worlds. I was all in. Ended up dislocating my shoulders again that winter, ended up having to get surgery that year to repair a torn labrum. That year, ended up racing at trials, didn’t make Junior Worlds but still trained really hard that year. 2012 Nationals in Halifax, me and my C2 partner Tom won Nationals in C2 200m. That was Cascades club 1st ever National Championship, that was my best accomplishment ever, that was my favorite part of life. I think about that all the time, still got a plaque in my room, it’s amazing for us. It really brought the community together.
I continued to race and sort of trained but through all that, while I couldn’t race or train, my coach (I give her a lot of credit for what she did for me to stay involved in the sport), she forced me to still come to practice and sit in the motor boat with her. She taught me the stroke and a lot about the sport from a coaching standpoint. I got to observe the other athletes that I usually would’ve been training with, I got to observe them from the motor boat, learned what they were doing well, what they needed to work on, and really get a better eye for the paddling stroke. That’s sort of where I started to love the coaching aspect of paddling. Through that I started coaching some younger kids at the club, being involved in the Junior Sprint Program and I loved that. It was so fun to pass on my passion I had for the sport to the younger kids, see them start from nothing and then watch them get much stronger, faster and ended up really loving the support. Then having them come to practice and say ‘oh did you see Adam won this race’, where before they would have no clue who Adam Van Koeverden was. Seeing that passion about the support is what I really loved about the sport. I continued coaching at the Cascades Canoe Club for 4-5 years, finished University, and then when I graduated last year I ended up getting a offer to be the Head Coach here in Fort Langley which is what I’m doing now.
My injuries, as I mentioned before when I dislocated my shoulder I had a torn labrum. That was on my top arm so every stroke you use that. I didn’t get surgery until the 3rd time I dislocated it. The 3rd time I dislocated it I was actually paddling. Started a time trial on the 2nd stroke of the race, pressed down, dislocated my shoulder, it was so painful, that sucked…. That was leading up to trials that year, it was super discouraging, I ended up getting surgery that fall. It was super discouraging, I was in a sling for 4 weeks while everyone I was racing and training against/with got to train hard and go to race, I couldn’t do anything. I credit the people around me to really help me out.
I worked with a Physiotherapist who was incredible and she made me an excellent program, I was surprised how quickly I was able to come back from that. But I didn’t half ass the physiotherapy program. I would wake up before school and do it, I would do it at lunch, and every evening. My training for those 2 months was the rehab and was the physiotherapy program. Without being incredibly dedicated to that I don’t think I would’ve come back nearly as fast I could’ve or as strong as I was. Having the mindset, your physiotherapy program is your training for that rehab part of recovery allowed me to come back as strong I was.
It was a super big struggle mentally because you got to see your friends and competitors getting fast, you got to see them paddling, you got to see them racing. What kept me sane and pushing to recovery to get better was going to practice even when I couldn’t practice. Just sitting in the motor boat with my coach and having her help explain certain things about the sport, basically teaching me while I couldn’t paddle. I got to learn so much and because of that I felt like I knew much more when I did start paddling again, when I could start paddling again. I knew so much more, I understood the stroke much better, I understood why we did certain types of workouts during certain periods, and that really helped me as an athlete and coach, it pushed me to learn about the sport more and more. So in a way, if it wasn’t for that injury I probably wouldn’t have got into coaching, I probably wouldn’t have learned as much as I did and in a sense I potentially wouldn’t have the success I had without learning what I learnt from that injury.
So now as a coach, I really pride myself on creating programs and training athletes without getting them injured. I think a lot of coaches don’t take injury prevention into consideration as much as they should. Because I struggled through an injury as an athlete I can now bring that back into my coaching philosophy. I really strive to make programs that focus on injury prevention. I do a ton of prehab exercises. I do a lot of stuff with bands before practice to make sure that everyone’s bodies are moving properly. As a coach you have ton of responsibilities, especially with young athletes. I work with a lot of 13,14,15 year old who are still learning how their bodies work and how to move their limbs. It’s quite easy for them to get injured when you are introducing weight training or stuff like that. I really strive to create these programs focusing on injury prevention. I pride myself on being a coach with little athlete injury rate. I think more coaches should take that into consideration because at the end of the day you have a ton of responsibility. The way you teach them to move their bodies and the exercises you teach them to do at 13,14 (those developmental stages) will have a really long impact on the rest of their life. Like me, because I had those shoulder injuries at a young age I’m still suffering from those injuries. Now I still dislocate my shoulder every 2 months or so because of what I did at a young age so I don’t really want that to happen to any of my athletes and that’s why I have such a strong emphasis on injury prevention and stuff like that in my training.” – Connor Fehr