Wider Horizons
Sharie Cousins and Chris Hansen
Sharie Cousins and Chris Hansen are pumped for the dragonboat season.

When Lethbridge College stresses team-building these days, it reinforces the message with paddles. Employees are quickly getting on board with the program. When it launches its own dragonboat this spring, the college will embark on a mission to spread the sport’s ideals and concepts beyond the campus: dragonboating as a metaphor for corporate and community success.

“Dragonboating involves several analogies of teamwork, cooperation and leadership,” says Sharie Cousins, co-coach, with Chris Hansen, of the college’s two teams involved in the ATB Financial Lethbridge Rotary Dragonboat Festival, set for the last weekend in June this year. “Those analogies are played out in the boat.”

With that in mind, Lethbridge College hopes to use its dragonboat and new-found expertise as a corporate and community training tool. Imagine: your company learning teamwork not in a boardroom, but on the waters of Henderson Lake. Tracy Edwards, Lethbridge College president, immediately saw the possibilities.

“When I realized the elements of a successful dragonboat team were synonymous with the culture we are trying to build at Lethbridge College, I knew we had to have our own,” says Edwards. “It is truly a team sport. There are no superstars; winning occurs only when all members work in harmony.”

The college has received requests from off-campus organizations wishing to use the boat for teamwork training, including the Lethbridge Hurricanes. After a less-than-stellar session on the water, the junior hockey team personified the tenet that strength and testosterone is not enough for dragonboat success.

Newcomers to the worldwide activity – it’s now second in participation to soccer – soon learn no single person can carry a dragon boat team.

“It’s not like hockey where a Gretzky can be such a dominant force,” says Cousins. “The team really is as good as its weakest link. There can’t be any showboaters or laggers, and it’s a real task to keep everyone together. If you have a keener, you have to manage them as part of the team. If you don’t, and they interfere with other paddlers, it causes a chain reaction that can destroy the teamwork.”

A dragonboat team consists of 18 paddlers, a drummer and a steersperson, all crowded into a watercraft that planes like a block of cement. When finely tuned, all 18 paddles rise and plunge in unison to the drummer’s beat, while the steersperson keeps the boat on course. When not finely tuned, picture synchronized swimmers without the noseplugs, or a wind turbine just after a vane falls off.

Unlike Canada’s Olympic rowing eights, teams populated by buff athletes who work together for years to achieve world-class results, dragon-boat squads are often comprised of enthusiastic amateurs at all levels of fitness and skill who must come together in some semblance of teamwork in a few weeks.

“It’s a combination of finesse, technique and timing,” says Cousins. “You can’t succeed with strength alone.”

The college’s philosophy is that all are welcome under its banner, including members of the community with no formal ties to the campus. Husbands paddle with wives, kayakers show up next to golfers, and gym rats share seats with couch potatoes.

The college teams – one is competitive; one involves beer – have, under Cousins’ tutelage, developed a technique for working with such diverse groups. Cousins isn’t willing to divulge her trade secret to competitors (read: The University of Lethbridge, the college’s rival for post-secondary dragonboat supremacy), but the college will share it as part of its community outreach. Let’s just say it creates cohesiveness among the chaos, without diminishing the diversity that makes each team unique.

The leadership analogies become richer. The steersperson can’t keep the craft on track unless the paddlers build the required speed; without it, the boat will wallow in the waves and drift into opposing lanes. The drummer – sitting with back to the finish line, notes Cousins – must coax just the right paddle rate throughout the 500-metre race to allow for an optimum speed versus stamina.

The heavy dragonboats start from a dead stop, requiring paddlers to go hard at the start to get the craft to plane. If they flag, the boat will drop back down and the race will be lost. But push hard too long, and there’ll be nothing left for the finish.

Goals, too, can differ. Some teams seek gold medals, some compete against the clock and others are happy just to finish. “My goal is to have people say ‘I want to be on that team’,” says Cousins, who started her paddling career with A Breast of ‘bridge, the well-known Lethbridge team comprised of breast cancer survivors. “Just the word, dragonboat, brings up images of energy, communication, excitement, teamwork and elation.”

Wider Horizons
Lethbridge College
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