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Jim Miller: Hope is not a strategy

“The harder I work, the luckier I seem to get.” – Jack Nicklaus Talk about thinking outside the box.
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Jim Miller

“The harder I work, the luckier I seem to get.”

– Jack Nicklaus

Talk about thinking outside the box. Fresh from a promising — yet ultimately disappointing — Olympic experience in 2006, the Canadian Snowboard Federation had some difficult decisions to make. Arguably the darling of the Turin Games, competitive snowboarding faced its own unique challenges in Canada.

Under-funded and only marginally understood by this country’s media, the Canadian Snowboard Team was an uneasy amalgam of different attitudes and styles — a hodgepodge of talented riders who struggled with the inherent contradictions of a sport based on non-conformism and rebellion trying to fit into the straight-laced world of the IOC. And it wasn’t working.

“The problem,” says their new head coach, Jim Miller, “was that there was absolutely no culture of high performance established among these athletes.” He pauses. Smiles. But there’s an edge there that can’t be ignored. “In the end, it doesn’t matter if you’re a swimmer, a wrestler or a snowboarder,” he explains. “High performance is high performance. It’s the way you live. It’s what you eat. What you dream. How you approach challenges. You see, at this level luck has nothing to do with results. Saying ‘we had bad luck’ (as the Canadian boarders did in Turin), simply allows one to duck responsibility for their poor performance…”

Sounds like fighting words to me. Yet the former wrestling star makes no apologies for his strong words. “Luck only plays a role in your performance when you’re not that well prepared. And that’s not the case with our snowboarders. I’ve been hired to lead the team to success in 2010 and I want the image of our destination to be very, very clear for everyone involved.” He takes a deep breath. “It’s pretty simple,” he says. “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll only get there by accident. Which begs the question: Do we really want to use up the $1.5 million we got from the Own the Podium program and hope for an accident?”

Jim Miller is not a snowboarder. He says he’s not much of a skier either (although his brother, Bob, was a highly-respected member of the Canadian ski team in the 1970s). And that’s where the “outside the box” thinking comes from. For Miller is one of Canada’s leading experts on top-level sports. A world-ranked member of the Canadian wrestling team from 1969 to ’76 and the coach of the team from 1980 to ’96, he was most recently the National Team High Performance Director for Pacific Sport (a Canadian multi-sport organization devoted to developing and nurturing elite athletes).

One of the many disciplines he dealt with during his time at Pacific Sport was snowboarding. “I really liked the people. I liked their energy. So when the CSF decided to start looking for a new head coach, I decided to apply for the job.”

He sighs. “I’d been frustrated at Pacific Sport,” he explains. “My job definition there was too broad. I wasn’t having the kind of impact I wanted. I knew that I could have a much bigger influence working with the snowboard team.”

In a daring, and very unconventional decision, the federation decided to go with Miller in May of 2007.

So how did the athletes respond? “To be perfectly honest,” he replies, “I would be totally naïve to think that I could walk in, present my ideas to 60 individuals and believe that they would all buy into my story. Still, I think most of them value what I have to offer...”

And that is? “To introduce the principles of high performance sport to team members while not destroying snowboard culture in the process.”

It’s a fine balancing act, he admits. But it’s one he’s ready to take on. “My colleagues in the Canadian sport community couldn’t understand why I’d want to do this. ‘Are you out of your mind?’ they all said. ‘Putting high performance and snowboarding together is oxymoronic.’” Another smile. But this time there’s genuine warmth there. “I just don’t see it that way. Snowboarding is what it is. And that’s very positive. We just have to put the sport in a high performance context…”

To whit: “Jumping off a cliff for the camera is not being a ‘great athlete’ to me,” he explains. “There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s fun. It’s exhilarating. But when we’re talking about Olympic sports, we’re talking about being able to perform on demand. And that’s really what it means to be a ‘great athlete’: to be pitted against the best in the world, in the most difficult environment and coming up with your best ever performance — and doing it when all your competitors are also trying to accomplish the same thing!”

But to achieve that kind of consistency (and self assurance), you need a plan. Which, says Miller, is the biggest challenge he has to overcome. “You can’t base your program on hope,” he says. “I’m dealing with people who are not familiar with planning. My job is to re-orient their thinking so that we can plan for a specific goal, follow the steps required to get there and then evaluate how we’ve done and how our plan worked (or didn’t work).”

Still, Miller believes his job is relatively simple. “My main task,” he says, “is to nurture an athlete’s enthusiasm. I want these snowboarders to be ready and willing to perform at the top of their game at the precise moment when it’s required. ‘Anywhere. Anybody. Anytime. Bring it on!’ That’s what high performance is for me.”

Again, it’s all about context. “Once you’ve accepted entry into the Olympic family, your perspective is going to change. Why? Because it’s all about performance on demand. It’s not about doing your own thing anymore.” A smile creeps into his features. “If your race start is at 9:10 and you show up at 9:20, your Olympic experience is very short. And you know what? I have no interest in bringing ‘sports tourists’ to the Games. I want to develop the kind of thinking on this team where athletes are so well prepared that they know exactly how they are going to perform come February 2010. Anything less will be a disappointment.”

And then he presents me with an argument that is hard to refute. “I spent some time in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s studying at the Institute of Sport in Moscow,” he recounts. “And during my stay I met one of the ‘fathers’ of the Russian hockey program. I was curious to find out how a country with no ice hockey history could become such a global powerhouse so quickly, so I asked him about it…”

His answer confirmed much of what Miller had discovered on his own, “He told me Russia’s move into hockey had been a very conscious decision. ‘There was a group of us,’ he said, ‘and we sat together in a room and asked: What do we have to do to become a great hockey nation? So we went through the different requirements — strength, conditioning, speed, agility — and hired the top professionals in each category to work in our new hockey school. It was that simple. Within a few years, we were the best in the world.’”

Jim’s eyes are bright. He has the look of a born-again proselytiser. “Do you see what they did? They applied the basic principles of high performance sport (which they had originally developed) to create a hockey system that, at the time, had no equivalent anywhere else in the world. And they totally changed hockey culture…”

He laughs. “What I heard from the snowboarders when I started is the same thing I heard from Canadian hockey players in the 1970s: ‘We don’t need to change our ways. We have our own culture — our own way of getting things done — and it’s always worked.” A long pause. “The hockey players were wrong then. And the snowboarders were wrong too…”

But it goes much further than that, says Miller. “People always ask me: ‘Why the heck do you do this? The pay is bad, the hours are long and the recognition is negligible.’ And my answer is always the same. I actually believe competitive sport is good for people. It’s good for the country because it’s good for its citizens. The attributes we develop through sports — courage, work ethic, discipline, commitment, co-operation etc. — these things can change the world!”

And he doesn’t hesitate to underscore that message with his charges. “I tell them all the time: You’re not doing this for the IOC or for fame or for a big money payoff. You’re not even doing this for the team. You’re doing this because, ultimately, it will make you a better person.”

When all is said and done, Miller continues, his prime responsibility is to keep his eye on the prize. “And the prize is: ‘I can help transform these young athletes into people who can have a positive impact on society.’” One last smile. “You know, I’ve been doing this for nearly 40 years now. If I didn’t believe that was true, I might as well jump off a bridge…”