New coach for speed skating association has need for speed

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This article was published 12/12/2015 (3829 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Life rushes up fast, as fast as Tyler Williamson-Derraugh always propelled his body around the long and frozen track, and that is all the more true for athletes.

For them, careers speed by in a flash.

Consider Williamson-Derraugh was training in May, preparing for his sixth season on Canada’s speedskating team. But the Winnipegger had just learned his wife, retired skater Gabrielle Waddell, was expecting their first child — it’s now due any day — and, well, things changed.

Around the same time, home started calling: the Manitoba Speed Skating Association was looking for a new head coach.

At 28, after a decade fine-tuning his body at the training centre in Calgary, after a career that spanned five world championships and 19 World Cups, the skater thought — maybe it was time to hang ’em up.

“I had been battling the idea of retiring and moving onto something,” Williamson-Derraugh said, chatting earlier this week.

“When the offer was presented to me, I thought, ‘that could be fun.’ Then the more I thought about it, the more realistic it became. We thought this could work. This could be a good way to transition.”

Seven months later, Williamson-Derraugh sauntered into the St. Norbert Arena, where he works out the province’s 20 top young skaters several days a week.

With his own career still fresh in mind, he’s still getting accustomed to being the one in charge. The days are longer now, he laughed. There’s more to worry about.

“From an athlete’s standpoint, you’re just focused on yourself, and getting ready for your race,” he said. “Now, I feel the stress of making sure I do that for all my athletes. That’s been a real change for me. But it doesn’t matter — they need to be 100 per cent, so I’m supposed to be tired at the end of the day.”

The workload won’t get any lighter. For now, there is a lot of hope resting on Williamson-Derraugh’s shoulders, and a lot of work to do. Under his watch, the MSSA hopes to rejuvenate Manitoba’s provincial speedskating team, building up a talent pool that has produced so many elites: Cindy Klassen. Susan Auch. Clara Hughes.

But there are challenges, too. Ice time is hard to come by, in Manitoba. The province’s only long-track facility, the outdoor Susan Auch Skating Oval, is waiting patiently for colder weather — which, in this unseasonably warm winter, is all too slow to come. That problem could get worse, as climate change moves on.

In the meantime, the program moves indoors, where hockey gobbles up the lion’s share of ice.

That means it’s tough to find a schedule that allows the teen speedskaters, still in school, to make practice times. And then they get used to the short-track indoor rink, which puts them at a disadvantage.

Last weekend at a competition in Minnesota, and again in Alberta the weekend before, Williamson-Derraugh’s team had only a couple of practices to adjust to the 400-metre long-track ovals. It’s the little things like that, which the coach thinks is holding the province’s top skating talents back.

“We’re really behind,” he said. “We really need to find a facility that we can be based out of all year. The potential is huge. We have incredible community support here to make something like that happen, an incredible history of athletes. I think if we had a facility, we could make it a home for speedskating for the country. It would be a perfect place for it.”

Still, Manitoba’s young speed skaters are thriving. At the American Cup in Minnesota last weekend, 16-year-old Winnipegger Tyson Langelaar blazed to a golden finish in the 1,500-metre, 3,000-metre and mass start races.

Another Manitoban skater, Alexis Scott, finished second in the junior women’s mass start. Those results prompted Williamson-Derraugh to joke with the U.S. coaches that next year, they’d have to dub the event the Canadian Cup.

It’s not all about the medals, though. At this level, a lot of it is about teaching young athletes process, and that’s what Williamson-Derraugh hopes to impart.

After all, he’s learned a lot in the decade since he graduated Shaftesbury High School and immediately packed his bags to train in Calgary. The sport was in his blood: his mother, Lori, is a longtime coach and former MSSA director.

His late father, Peter Williamson, competed for Canada at the 1968 Olympics, and became a renowned coach and technical director of Speed Skating Canada. Still, the youngster had to learn the hard way how much work it takes to reach the top.

“It took me maybe three years to dial in, that this is what I have to do,” he mused. “From nutrition, to sleep, to sports psychology and preparing myself for every training session. That’s really what I’m trying to pass on to my athletes here. As much as I want them to succeed now, I want them to succeed in the future, and represent the province at World Cups, and the Olympics.”

And maybe it really is fate, that Williamson-Derraugh should be the man to show them the way. In a poignant twist, the MSSA head coach title he now holds once belonged to his father, who died suddenly when Williamson-Derraugh was only five years old.

Growing up, most of his coaches were former proteges of his father; now, he gets to share the experience of raising up the next generation of skaters.

“I was always following in his footsteps a bit,” he said.

 

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca