HIGH ACHIEVERS: Pat Lester’s passion for coaching takes him to second Canada Summer Games

A huge team of 46 Ottawa athletes are set to compete at the St. John’s 2025 Canada Summer Games in Newfoundland. The Ottawa Sports Pages will be sending out a free daily email newsletter with recaps, previews and profiles throughout the Aug. 9-24 national youth multi-sport event.

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By Martin Cleary

Like many young Canadian boys, Pat Lester was drawn to hockey to have fun, be competitive and create memories with his brothers and neighbourhood friends.

It wasn’t surprising that Canada’s national winter sport quickly became his primary sport.

But when winter turned to spring and summer, hockey was put on hold. Now what?

When the Lester family moved to Carleton Place from Montreal, the children were directed to the Carleton Place Canoe Club for summers of canoeing and kayaking.

Pat Lester, the youngest of the three boys in his family, seized this opportunity and started to hang around the John Street club with his two brothers. The club, the paddlers and the environment became an integral part of his life, and hockey, over time, became secondary.

For the past 30 years, the CPCC has been a major focus for him, whether he was chasing and achieving a berth on Canada men’s junior kayak team or when he turned to coaching, becoming the club’s head coach for the past 12 years with a growing list of accomplished athletes and important regatta assignments for himself.

Lester’s next coaching role is right around the corner. He will serve as the Team Ontario head coach for boys’ and girls’ canoe at the 2025 Canada Summer Games in St. John’s, NL, which open Friday and continue to Aug. 25. The canoe-kayak sprint races begin Monday and end Aug. 14.

“I wasn’t planning on going this time (to the Games),” Lester said earlier this week in a phone interview, adding he had been the Team Ontario girls’ canoe coach for the 2022 Canada Summer Games in the Niagara Region.

“It’s hard to get away from the club. I knew they (Canoe Kayak Ontario Sprint) were looking for a coach and I had chatted with Ryan Blair (provincial technical director). He asked me if I could make it work.”

Lester, knowing there would be CPCC athletes on Team Ontario, approached his club’s board of directors for its approval for him to apply for the provincial position. The directors said yes and so did the provincial sport governing body.

“It’s exciting to go now that I know how it works,” Lester said about his staff appointment to the Team Ontario canoe lineup. “They do an incredible event and make it fun. It’s multi-sport and you get to meet other athletes from other sports. It’s extra special. I’m excited for it.”

At the 2022 Games in Niagara, Lester helped Team Ontario win eight gold, 14 silver and 12 bronze medals in canoe and kayak. The Games were delayed one year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Three years later, Lester feels the 18-paddler Ontario team for the 2025 Games also is capable of producing many medals, but is well aware of the strong challenges from Nova Scotia and Quebec.

The bulk of the Ontario paddlers come from Eastern Ontario with 11 athletes earning team berths in the four disciplines. The entire women’s canoe squad is from this region – Isabel Lowry and Abbigail Haines, both of CPCC; and Ruby Muhl, Madeleine Beauregard and Julia Price, all from the Rideau Canoe Club.

At the recent world junior canoe sprint championships, Lowry, who is coached by Lester, won three gold medals (C1, C2 and C4) and Beauregard had one gold (C4).

Read More: Olympian Toshka Besharah captures first world title in U23 kayak, Isabel Lowry wins 3 world junior gold

The other Eastern Ontario paddlers heading to the Games are Wesley Bartlett and Cole Norman, both of Rideau, and Roenn Hodgins, CPCC, men’s canoe; Ryan Naroditsky and Frederic Brais-Miklosi, both of Rideau, men’s kayak; and Kate Osborne, Rideau, women’s kayak.

Lester also has had two national team coaching assignments to the 2024 and 2018 Olympic Hopes Regatta, which is considered a world championship for U16 and U17 paddlers.

At the 2018 Olympic Hopes, he coached the women’s canoe team and watched Sophia Jensen of Chelsea, PQ, and the Cascades Canoe Club win her final three gold medals at that international regatta in Poznan, Poland.

The 2024 Olympic Hopes was staged in Szeged, Hungary, which is viewed as the mecca for sprint canoe racing.

“It’s intense,” he said about the Szeged racing atmosphere. “There are thousands of Hungarians with their faces painted and having noise makers.

“You go and you see their passion. Their passion is for canoeing just as our passion is for hockey.”

Lester’s passion for coaching started to grow when he was a paddler and a hockey player.

“I was fortunate I had really good coaches growing up,” he recalled. “They were good and built relationships with the athletes.

“In hockey, I had one coach in particular who left an impression on me. I really respected him, how he coached and managed the team.”

After retiring as an athlete in 2011, he became the assistant coach to head coach Blair at CPCC. Over the course of the next year, Lester learned about coaching, but Blair also was preparing him to become the head coach in 2012.

“I was building connections. It was really rewarding to be a part of the athletes’ journey,” Lester added. “It (becoming head coach) was a big step, but it worked out.”

But there was more to coaching than training the athletes on and off the water. He also is responsible for club administration, seasonal staff, camps, etc., which are equally important roles as it moved into being a medium-sized club from a small one.

The CPCC has about 200 sprint canoeists, 500 summer campers as well as an adult program.

“I’ve always wanted to (coach),” Lester said. “Not until the year before (being hired as head coach) did I think it could be a career. Once I started in high performance … it became a passion.”

Lester will be one of five Team Ontario canoe staff members at the Canada Summer Games in St. John’s. He’s responsible for properly entering the paddlers in their races, developing race plans, supporting the team as a whole and repairing boats and making adjustments when required.

During his days as an athlete, when he won three kayak medals in crew boats at the Canadian sprint canoe kayak championships and was named to the 2005 national men’s junior team, he was building his coaching future.

He came close to representing Canada at an international regatta, but fell just short of making the trip.

“It was close, but still a good experience,” he said. “My time as an athlete helped shape (my) style of coaching.”

As a kayaker, Lester put training for all-around development ahead of racing for medals.

“I enjoyed the challenge of training, the hard work. I wasn’t the biggest of the group. But I enjoyed the recognition from the coaches for that level of work,” Lester offered.

“I loved training more than racing … the challenges of every day, the spring camps, where we’d train three times a day for six days. I remember most working with my teammates in singles and crews to be successful.”

Lester has carried the philosophy into his coaching career.

Lester will be joined by 10 more coaches, managers or mission staff from the nation’s capital on Team Ontario. Local mission staff include Zoe Meil-Charbonneau, Scott Searle, Marc Sorrie and Courtney Labelle-Godin, the coaches are John Nguyen (women’s volleyball), Stephanie Chin (women’s rugby sevens), Aaron McDonald (men’s rugby sevens) and Tracy Vaillancourt (women’s soccer), while Greg Hedgecoe (men’s rugby sevens) and Mary James (women’s box lacrosse) will serve as managers.

Ottawa at the Canada Games Daily Newsletter

A huge team of 46 Ottawa athletes are set to compete at the St. John’s 2025 Canada Summer Games in Newfoundland. The Ottawa Sports Pages will be sending out a free daily email newsletter with recaps, previews and profiles throughout the Aug. 9-24 national youth multi-sport event.

_{By clicking on the submit button, you consent to receive the above newsletter from the Ottawa Sports Pages. You may unsubscribe by clicking on the link at the bottom of our emails. Ottawa Sports Pages | 21 Kolo Dr., Ashton, Ont., K0A 1B0 | 613-261-5838}