Mike Bird, 13-11-1988, Canada
The familiar rumbling of a freight train passing through town could be heard, but better yet, it was felt through the vibration of my twin IKEA bed. Like a massage that helped me relax and doze off to sleep, I knew it must have been just after midnight in Trois-Rivières.
It had been a few months since I’d started living in the town five-and-a-half days a week. The remaining 36 hours – usually spread over Sunday and Monday morning – were spent in Montréal: then and still my home base.
Growing up in English-speaking Canada, you could say I was an outlier – dare I say outsider – in the town of just under 114 000. Just over 95% of residents identify as francophones. But Trois-Rivières was playing host to me while I carried out two concurrent missions.
Mission One: coach the local college football team. Mission Two: learn French.
Although I had attended university in Montréal, an officially French metropolis, I’d neglected to see just how important the language was to the culture of the province of Québec.
Coming out of my studies, I found myself grasping for some sort of meaningful employment and feeling incredibly unconfident about doing so. Everyone around simply seemed better than me when it came to speaking French – why would I get hired over any of these people?
Thanks to a friend of mine from school, I received the chance to coach a local football team on the south shore of the city. Football had been much of my life while doing my undergraduate degree. It had given me community, a sense of purpose, and it was where I wanted to go in my career. Full-time football coaching: that was where I was headed. This part-time gig was another step in that direction.
But upon arriving at Champlain College St-Lambert, a major change in environment became glaringly obvious to me. While everyone could get by in English, not all of my French-speaking colleagues or players could truly express themselves in my mother tongue, and I was simply awful in theirs.
A lack of strong communication skills and empathy turned into a weak, immature leadership position for me. I coached two seasons at Champlain before being mercifully demoted from my role, which triggered an immediate resignation on my part.
I was 25, out of my coaching job, and my French still sucked. It was time for a drastic change.
Trois-Rivières was the answer to my problem of being a poor French speaker. My good friend JP Chartier, aware of my plight, helped open the door to me joining the coaching staff at CEGEP de Trois-Rivières (CEGEPs are like community colleges). The only anglophone in the program of roughly 70 athletes and a dozen coaches, this was the perfect place for me to become truly immersed in French.
My initial meeting with the team’s head coach, Martin Croteau, featured a lot of poorly constructed sentences and mispronounced words coming from my mouth, but I could see and hear his openness to having me in his midst. That was in February of 2014. The football season kicked off in August.
Going through training camp in the late summer was both exciting and bumpy. I was coaching a part of the game – special teams – that was still quite new to me. My knowledge of what I was teaching was limited, almost as much as the French I was using to transmit it to our athletes.
Skill development drills would happen where I barely knew what to say. Effectively communicating the more complex strategic elements of the game? Forget about it!
All that to say, everyone around me was extraordinarily patient with me. My coaching colleagues and players could see me making an earnest effort, and they helped me improve my French every day. JP, who doubled as my roommate (we shared a two-room apartment down by those train tracks) and ride to-and-from Montréal, and I would go to bed at around midnight most days after leaving the office at around 11 pm. My head was usually pounding after spending the day thinking through every syllable, word and phrase that had been said to me.
That’s what happens when you learn a new language later in life. Your brain is less plastic and doesn’t absorb massive changes in its wiring as easily as it did when you were younger. Nonetheless, it can still change, and changing it was for me.
By October, something had started to click. My head hurt less at the end of the day. I didn’t have to ask people to repeat themselves as often. Other coaches were acknowledging the change in my spoken French. It was becoming more fluid, even though I still experienced moments of total confusion from time-to-time.
Fast forward to November, and Martin was let go as the program’s head coach. It was a sad and difficult moment for everyone, as he’d led the program through an noteworthy stretch of championship wins earlier on in his tenure.
His departure created an opportunity for me to interview as an internal candidate for the program’s top job. The interview was like a final exam for my immersion experience. 90 minutes of questions and answers in French in front of a panel of five, it was a lively exchange and one of the proudest moments of my career. Every job interview I’ve had since then has simply felt easy in comparison – a surefire sign of growth!
More importantly, my time in Trois-Rivières unlocked significant gains in my personal development. I consider this period to be as influential and formative as any other in my life.
It taught me patience and forgiveness – the same patience and forgiveness that others showed me while stammering through coaching points.
It taught me to shut my mouth and listen carefully. It’s funny how much you learn when you do that.
And it taught me that if you really want to try to understand and connect with someone else, go spend time in their world, and you’ll realize that it’s as fascinating as your own (if not more so!).
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