The Appreciation Post
I have come from a lifetime of sport. I can remember playing mini sticks in the boot room of my grandparents farm. I couldn’t have been more than 4 years old. I always wanted to keep score. Even back then I didn't love winning nearly as much as I hated losing. That, and the bliss I feel when I am fully engaged in play were all the motivation I have ever needed. In fact they still are.
Many years after my introduction to sport I found disc golf. I distinctly remember my first round and my first throw. I am one of the minority of players who went to the course by themselves and tried the game solo for their first time. I was given the general directions to a local course and told roughly where to park (this was in the before times, when we used word of mouth and paper maps). I found my route, parked my rental, and took my two brand new discs to hole one. I stood on the tee and with absolutely no idea what I was doing reached back and threw as hard as I could. Instantly my exact first thought was, ‘yep, I will do this for the rest of my life’, followed immediately by my second thought. ‘ I need to bring this back to the place where I am from’. Those two thoughts have stayed front and centre in my mind for almost 25 years. They have been the single biggest motivator in my professional life, weird eh?
I feel a deep kinship and an odd responsibility to Nova Scotia, and truly all of Atlantic Canada. Somehow it feels like my life's mission is to honour the place I was raised by constantly showing it off. Travel has been a great source of joy and understanding in my life. Each country I have visited brought me a different perspective on how we as humans choose to live. If you didn’t know it already, those of us who live in Atlantic Canada are among the lucky ones. We have space to roam, clean water to drink, beautiful trees to linger in the shade, and we are surrounded by people who care. Sure, it’s not perfect, but it is pretty damn good.
Like many of us I had to leave to gain some perspective. I spent 12 years roaming around North America but I always ended up coming home. Each time with a slightly different appreciation for what we have. In my youth I fantasized about the big cities and all the beautiful chaos they contain. As I got older I craved the solitude of the forest more. Now that I have experienced both I can better appreciate just what we have here.
Which brings me to where I stand today; this mountain and everything it has come to represent in my life. Wentworth has always been a gem. It exists in the part of the province that is often overlooked, Northern Nova Scotia. We aren’t the vibrant city of Halifax with its years of colourful history, we are not the south shore with its folklore of pirates and salvation. We are not the valley where like minded people all seem to congregate to grow, and we are not Cape Breton where the people all seem to bond over a shared identity. Somehow we are an undefined part of a province that seems too small to be able to hide something this beautiful, yet here we are.
When I was offered the chance to build something in Wentworth I knew it would change my life but I had no idea how much I would fall in love with the place. This is my dream job, one that I feel blissfully thankful for every time I show up to work. I have played close to 500 courses in a total of 10 different countries. Our land on this mountain is as good as any I have ever laid eyes on. It is my job to cultivate every bit of beauty I can from this space and to find a way to get people to notice.
We have some amazing things on the go here and I am under no illusions that every single person in the province will set foot on the hill. However I would like as many people as humanly possible to know that what we have here is truly amazing.
So keep all of that in mind over the next few weeks, months, and years as we begin to implement the plans I have created in my mind. Our focus will be on making the best courses possible, showing off the trees, the views, and every bit of magic this mountain contains. This plan works best when people witness it for themselves. At some point we want everyone who reads this to find their way to the mountain so you can experience for yourself what makes this place truly special.