This blog is about the journey of the  writing of the book  A Hero's Journey: From Little Norway to Olympia Sports Camp. The blog will contain excerpts from the book and my personal thoughts on what the place and the people that make up Olympia's journey is all about. The title comes from the great book Tuesdays With Morrie, by Mitch Albom. The blog's title is recognizing Dave Grace as Camp Director but all content is my own.


Chapter 4 of the book is called MEET THE MENTORS and is about the Coaches. The role of mentors in our life, our journey, cannot be over stated. They impact our values and help define where we go and what we do after our playing days are over. The list of coaches at Olympia is several generations long. When Olympia started in 1974 at the Camp Winnebago site it was a one-week basketball camp and the cream of the crop of coaches in Ontario were there. John Petruschshak, Terry Thomson, Doug Hayes, Gerry Brumpton, Bob Coull and many others were the staff coaches in the first couple of years. A couple of years later football was started and Doug Hayes suggested that Dr.Richard Hawkins, a former QB at Western and a recent Canadian champion and league MVP for the London Lords, would be great for the football camp.

Doc Hawkins' impact on the future of Olympia Sports Camp went far beyond the football field. Here's a teaser from an interview with 'Hawk,' a world-class orthopaedic surgeon and a world-class person.

“One day Dave said to me, come on, I want to go for a ride,” Hawk explains,” We drove through Huntsville and along Hwy 60 and he turned left on a road called Limberlost road and he said he wanted to show me something. The drive was long and windy, and I remember at one point we had to stop in the middle of the road because the sun was so bright that we couldn’t see anything. The road was treacherous at some points, but the destination was worth it. There was a lake here and a lake there and a very beautiful property between the two lakes. Dave described it to me as being a Norwegian base for infantry or pilots or whatever in the Second World War. There were a lot of neat buildings there. Dave says, “what do you think of all this? What do you think of this being a site for a sports camp?” 



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