As the head coach of Racewalk West, Gerry Dragomir (MHPCTL 2021) coaches four international-level racewalk athletes. One of those athletes is fellow KIN Alum, Evan Dunfee (BKin 2014), who won the Bronze Medal for the men’s 50km walk at the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games. “One day Evan showed up to practice with his teenage brother, who was working with our group at the time. It did not take long for Evan to show his true intentions about the racewalk and we have been conquering the world ever since,” remarks Gerry. His third time at the Olympics was certainly the charm for Gerry when he served as a coach at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics to help Evan win his first Olympic medal.
However, the pre-event did not go as smoothly as he had hoped. “We did not actually partake in the 2020 Games in Tokyo because our event was moved to Sapporo,” notes Gerry, “[so] COVID-19 made for a rather unloving partner this time around.” Nonetheless, “Evan’s event was everything [they] had hoped for” and “it was all [in] great fun.” Despite his coaching achievements and merits, Gerry credits his role model, Joanne Fox, and his mentor, Peter Ericksson, for helping him become the coach he is today. “The responsibility for coaching racewalk athletes squarely rests on Joanne Fox, the principal of UBC Vantage College. She was my racewalk coach in 1999 as she studied for her doctorate. It was her inspiration and enthusiasm that brought me on this fascinating journey. Former head coach of Athletics Canada Peter Ericksson was one of the people who helped Evan and me, make the turn from international participants to world-class performers.”
Before participating in the 2020 Olympics, Gerry had begun the professional Master’s program in High Performance and Technical Leadership (MHPCTL) at the UBC School of Kinesiology. He graduated in 2021, so he has yet to see how the program has helped him hone his coaching skills: “I have not made up my mind yet about what the HPCTL program is to me. However, skill-honing was at the top of my list.” Gerry further explains how having previous coaching experience is critical to developing skills and succeeding in this program. “A lot of what you learn in HPCTL requires you to tap into that experience. The coach’s existing body of knowledge is recast into an evidence-based structure that can be measured, assessed, analysed, and improved on a continuous basis. This is the essence of Kaizen [or changing for the better] … [and] the program is built upon a coaching process that prioritizes continuous improvement.”
The School offers many exciting courses on coaching and technical leadership, but Program Director and professor Dr. Maria Gallo’s course on High Performance Sport Inquiry was the highlight of the program for Gerry. “Although I highly enjoyed other courses, 596 was the meat of the HPCTL sandwich. Taking part in a research project allowed me to exchange a massive amount of knowledge with my class, as well as gain new understandings of the coaching environment. I find that pretty special and exciting!” In addition to this course, Gerry notes KIN 517, Business of High-Performance Sport in Canada, as one of his more beneficial classes. He used to “[work] with NPO organizations as a public practicing accountant for over 35 years” and enrolling in KIN 517 ignited “a new area of interest [for him] when preparing a paper on “Sport for Development in Indigenous Communities in Canada.”
Gerry strongly encourages anyone involved in coaching to join the program, but he provides a word of advice for those interested: “Commit fully, and without reservation, to HPCTL. Half measures in this program are useless, so you will be disappointed if you do not take full advantage of what the program has to offer. It is helpful if you have a couple of Olympic cycles of hands-on coaching experience (just the 4-year cycles are important, not necessarily the actual Games).” After graduating from the MHPCTL program, Gerry hopes to “complete a doctoral degree in the near future” and eventually conduct a documentary on his “40+ year-long career as a sports coach.”
