By Dan Plouffe
Weave your way through the construction pylons, around the piles of tires in the parking lot, take the door next to the auto service shop entrance, go upstairs by the ruffled posters for past MMA shows, and once the smell of sweat hits you, you’ve found it.
Inside the small Ottawa Jiu-Jitsu gym in Mechanicsville lies the semi-secret site of the Gen Morrison rebuilding project, where the 35-year-old is pursuing a return to world-class form following a seven-year break from wrestling.
In two weeks’ time, it could also be home to Ottawa’s newest Olympian, if all goes well at the final Paris 2024 wrestling qualification tournament in Turkey.
The setting doesn’t exactly match the image of the grandest stage in sport. The mats show their age in places and the space can sometimes feel a bit cramped (just ask National Capital Wrestling Club head coach Chris Schwauren, who almost collides with the mirrors after being on the receiving end of a Morrison throw).
But dig a little deeper and you’ll see that this is the perfect place for Morrison, as she pursues an Olympic berth for the second time in her career, now as a mother of three young kids.
“I love that our club has every age group,” smiles Morrison, who on a spring Thursday night you could find tangling with a preteen, her main training partner Jessica Hong of the Carleton University Ravens, and coach Chris, who outweighs her considerably but still hates trying to handle her speed and tenacity.
“I show up at practice, and there’s high school kids there, and varsity athletes, and some older people who are just rolling around for fun,” she notes. “It just constantly gives the perspective of what this has always been about. It’s about fun and the people in the community – that’s the real reason that we keep showing up, regardless of which goal we’re chasing at that time.
“The people alongside me have given me life and helped me fall in love with the sport again.”
In the earlier chapters of Morrison’s wrestling career, the Shawville-born athlete won eight consecutive Canadian championships bronze medals before breaking through for gold in 2015.
The Toronto 2015 Pan American Games champion went on to capture a bronze medal in the women’s lightweight category at the 2015 World Championships to secure a 2016 Olympic berth for her country. But Morrison ultimately didn’t get to compete at the Rio Games after losing the Canadian Olympic team trials.
She then retired from wrestling and focused on building a family with her husband Ryan Morrison, with whom she now has three children under age 7.
A return to high-performance wrestling was not part of the plans when Morrison first started training with a client of Ryan’s at Sport Science Rehab and Performance, but the allure of potentially entering the 2023 Canadian Championships gradually grew.
“It’s an opportunity to redo it with all the right perspectives and all the right attitudes about it,” Morrison explains. “It’s super fun and it’s a total privilege to be able to do this again. It doesn’t feel like the weight of the world the same way that it did in my 20s.”
With a relatively short window to get ready, Morrison selected the nationals as her first comeback tournament. She took down reigning Canadian champion Madi Parks in her opening match, won her next two by pinfall, and scored a last-second takedown to win the gold medal final.
“I didn’t have a specific goal in mind, it was really kind of like an experiment almost,” recalls the Embrun resident. “Preparing for the nationals, I really saw it as something I was just doing for myself to get back into shape.
“I don’t know, if I really liked running, maybe I would have just signed up for a marathon, but what I know is wrestling.
“I didn’t know if I was gonna show up at nationals and be out in two or win the whole thing – I kind of felt like both were equally probable because I had no measure on where I stood.
“That really made for a fun competition, feeling really present and taking it one match at a time and not really getting ahead of myself.”
Despite the rapid success in her return, Morrison wasn’t immediately sure if she’d continue on to pursue a Paris Olympic berth. She’d been injured at the nationals, and the thought of devoting the energy to pursue the Olympics seemed a little overwhelming initially.
“I really did hem and haw, because I know what an emotional journey it could be, I know how much it requires, and I know the uncertainty of it all, and I wasn’t really sure that was really worthwhile to me again,” Morrison details. “But I was just really encouraged by a lot of people within the community, and my own close family group, that I didn’t really have to change anything. This was an opportunity to do it my way, and if it didn’t play out, it didn’t play out.
“We committed to doing it in a way that didn’t feel like I was sacrificing my family life or sacrificing some of my current values compared to when I was 25 and chasing this dream. It looks a lot different and it feels a lot different at 35.”
With age also comes wisdom. Morrison realized that there wouldn’t be much benefit to travelling to tournaments frequently, so she’s hardly competed at all. She figures she’s been in thousands of matches and hasn’t forgotten how to wrestle.
Competitions can also disrupt optimal training, the travel would disrupt her family, and she may only get to wrestle one match if she loses. There was also the risk of injury.
“Being older, I really have no time to afford any injuries,” Morrison highlights.
Instead, Team Morrison’s focus has been on getting her body as ready as it can be. That includes “long and intensive” fitness workouts of 2 or 2.5 hours three times a week.
That strength and athleticism training is done at Ryan’s sports science centre on Baxter Rd., which opened in September 2021. There, she also works with strength coaches, therapists and nutritionists.
“My husband always reminds me, ‘There’s no roadmap for doing this at your age or after being removed for so long,'” Morrison recounts. “We’re all in this together and putting our own expertise into seeing how we can make this work within the confines of managing family life and being 35 years old.
“It’s been a super rewarding process, because it’s not like I’m repeating the same formula and hoping for a different result than I did 10 years ago. This is a completely different process, with completely different motives and a completely different group of people.
“I’m learning so much about myself along the way and learning more about the sport and I feel like I’m growing a lot.”
Morrison also attends three practices a week with NCWC, where she works on perfecting her technical and tactical base. They’ll scrimmage and practice situational wrestling, but it’s a fairly controlled environment where injury risk is relatively low. And if Morrison has a sore back, she’ll take it easier.
In many ways, the setup mirrors her experience at the University of Calgary, the site of her first run for the Olympics (which was also where Ottawa wrestler Erica Wiebe was based en route to her Rio 2016 gold). The Calgary Dinos’ basement wrestling gym isn’t terribly glamorous, but it propelled her to become an elite wrestler, while the Canadian Sport Institute offered world-class training equipment and sports specialists.
What Ottawa doesn’t have is a slew of national team members to train with. The Carleton University wrestling club is young and most local wrestlers with big aspirations go to universities elsewhere.
Instead of sending Morrison away to training camps and competitions, Wrestling Canada has helped fund top coaches and athletes’ visits to Ottawa. Among those who have come to town are Parks, the 2022 Commonwealth Games silver medallist, national women’s lightweight bronze medallist Augusta Eve (who’s from Ottawa but now based in Calgary) and two-time Olympic medallist Carol Huynh, who now coaches with U of C and the national team in Calgary.
“From day one, in my first conversation with Chris Woodcroft, (Wrestling Canada’s) high-performance director, at the nationals, he was so encouraging and open-minded and he understood very well that my situation was different and that my day-to-day life looked very different than a lot of other athletes, but that as an organization, they were going to try to support me,” Morrison outlines. “I think that’s fuelled me and given me confidence – the respect and the trust that I was given with my process.”
Morrison had earned the right to represent Canada at last year’s World Championships, but she declined the berth, primarily to focus on her recovery from the injury at nationals, and to best prepare for December’s Canadian Olympic team trials.
“Having been on the other side eight years ago – where I did go to World Championships, I qualified (Canada’s Olympic berth), and then I felt really burnt out when Olympic trials came around – I didn’t really want to repeat the same pattern,” Morrison signals.
The approach proved fruitful. At the Canadian team trials in Edmonton, Morrison faced Saskatoon’s Katie Dutchak in the best-of-three final, winning the first match 2-1, losing the second 4-2, and then prevailing 3-2 in the third.
That allowed Morrison to represent Canada at international qualification tournaments in order to try to secure her ticket to Paris.
At the end of February, Morrison attended the Pan American qualifier in Mexico, where she controlled her opening match of the tournament to beat her Venezuelan opponent 5-2, but then lost 6-2 to a Cuban challenger – one win short of an Olympic berth.
“I had a few tears, and I went off to a corner and had a moment to myself, and then I thought, ‘OK, let’s keep some perspective and call home and talk to the kids,’” recalls Morrison, who got a jolt from the call, but not quite the way she imagined.
Her kids were bawling on the other end of the line after staying up past their bedtime to watch the match, so Morrison jumped into mom-mode to console them and tell them everything would be alright.
“It’s lessons learned for them, too,” smiles the U of C commerce grad. “At some point, they were going to have to face the reality that sometimes mom’s gonna lose. Because from their perspective, you just show up and you win – up until then, I’d only done that and it worked out. So they’re learning that it’s OK to put yourself out there, and it’s OK to fail too.”
Schrauwen, who accompanied Morrison for the competition, feels that the experience from the Pan Am event will prove beneficial for the upcoming last-chance global qualifier. Morrison was certainly back in excellent wrestling form, he notes, but a hyper-competitive international event could feel a little new again. Morrison says “nerve fatigue” was a factor in her defeat.
“It’s only been like a year and a half now that she’s been back. And I feel like she’s getting better every tournament,” underlines Schwauren, who expects the competition to be tight in Turkey. “It’s never easy. It’s never not close. But when it goes down to the wire, from what I’ve seen, that’s when Gen shines.”
A big lesson Schrauwen tries to emphasize with his younger athletes – and it’s one that Morrison has learned too – is that athletes can become so stressed about achieving a result that they don’t enjoy the process.
“Take the Olympic qualifier out of it, which is hard, but then take the idea that this is a world-class tournament, and I’m excited to go be a part of it and go compete and face up against some of the best people in the world,” Morrison echoes. “There’ll be desperation out there, it’s everyone’s last chance to punch their ticket. But I’m excited.
“Never did I think I would be back in a position where I can compete at that level again and get to experience that kind of rush, so I’m super pumped for it.”
Morrison will be chasing one of the three available Olympic qualification positions in her women’s 50 kg freestyle category. In order to punch a ticket to Paris, she’ll either have to win every match including a semi-final on May 10, or earn the final berth through the repechage on May 11.
Morrison is not one of the four seeded athletes in her division. That officially makes her an underdog, but an unknown may be a better tag.
“I feel really good,” signals the two-time FISU world student games champ. “To be frank, the world qualifier, for many, is kind of a crapshoot in the sense that you can’t really prepare for each individual person, and especially having not really been on the world scene for so long.
“We’ve really focused on my own game and of course to be ready to face and adjust to different styles.”
Morrison has experienced the heartbreak of being agonizingly close to qualifying for the Olympics several times, but she doesn’t feel desperate to avoid it this time, even though it’s likely her last chance.
“Obviously everyone wants to go to the big party,” she states, “but I think I’d definitely be at peace with (falling short).
“The last seven years after I retired, it wasn’t like I was losing sleep over it. I lost, I felt the pain, I felt the sting, and then I moved on.
“I think one of my advantages this time is I don’t have that fear of losing. When you compete with the fear of losing, you freeze up, you tense up, and you’re not able to take the risks that are needed to actually pull off something like that. You need to kind of feel free, you need to be allowed to put your full self out there.
“The fact that I get to come back to my three healthy kids and husband and parents – I’m going into this feeling like I’ve already won.
“Getting a second chance at doing all of this so many years later – I haven’t had a day that I haven’t been excited to go to training, so it’s not like this will have been wasted time up to this point if I don’t win. Every day is icing on the cake.
“I do feel like I’m in that sweet spot – hungry to win, but not scared of losing – so it’s fun. I think that’s putting sport in its proper place, and I think that’s when you’re able to get the most out of yourself.”
Morrison will have her husband with her at the global qualifier, along with Schwauren as coach and Hong as training mate. Her kids won’t be far from her mind, especially the day after she leaves for Turkey when her son Bobby turns 7.
“There’s a lot of tears going on,” notes Morrison, whose son Cory will soon be 5, while daughter Haley is 3. “We’ll be having Bobby’s birthday party before I leave and then probably celebrating again when I come back.
“He’ll be milking us for all it’s worth.”
The biggest key to the Gen Morrison rebuilding project is the “all-in” support and encouragement she’s received from the people around her, she underlines. Morrison has been told by people in her close circle and beyond that she inspires them, though she says it’s “tricky” to think about what she hopes others may learn from her journey.
“Part of me wants to say, ‘You should just go after it and chase your dream,’ but I also understand that I’ve got that kind of privilege,” she explains.
“Without my parents stepping in and helping me with my kids, literally every day, and my in-laws and my whole (Integrated Support Team), and my coach and training partners, and my husband, he owns and operates a clinic and he works like a dog, and I have a huge community of high-performance and retired wrestling best friends who helped me along to keep perspective and also get the best out of myself, and I have access to this club that has all kinds of hidden talents and zero ego, which is the perfect formula that I needed – like, I’ve been given every tool.
“But what I would want people to know is you can find joy and fun and high-performance all in the same package. Coming back after seven years away at 35 years old after three kids – it is possible to do it differently, and do it well.”
After returning to win her Canadian wrestling title in 2023, Gen Morrison posted several heartfelt tributes to her supporters:
So very proud of you Gen,you have put Campbell’s Bay,Que on the map,such a strong person,you will qualify.