I have been in rooms with Stanley Cup champions. I have stood behind benches at the Olympic Games. I have sat across boardroom tables with national sport leaders and international audiences on every continent the game of hockey touches. And I have worked with some of the most physically gifted athletes this country has ever produced.
What separated the ones who sustained success from the ones who didn't was never physical.
It was what they did with pressure. It was how they understood themselves - and whether the environment around them gave them any real chance to do that.
And I am not writing this from the outside looking in. Throughout my career I was often brought in specifically to rebuild culture, to walk into environments where something had gone wrong and try to put it right. I understood that responsibility. I worked hard at it. I communicated constantly. I cared deeply. And there were still moments where, despite all of that, I didn't fully grasp what was missing beneath the surface.
Having humility is not a weakness. It is the beginning of getting it right.
When I started coaching, mental wellness wasn't a conversation in the coach's room. If a player was struggling, the unspoken expectation was that they'd manage it - quietly, privately, without disrupting the program.
I watched it cost us. Not in obvious ways. In the player who had everything but couldn't perform when it mattered. In the team that looked right on paper and fell apart under pressure. In the young athlete who walked away from the game earlier than anyone expected.
What I eventually came to understand - and it took longer than it should have - is that those weren't talent failures. They were environment failures. Culture failures. And even when you're brought it to fix them, you can't fix what you can't fully see.
The mental side of sport was not the soft edge of performance. It was the foundation of it. And too many of us had been building on sand.
Truly sustainable athletic programs share one defining characteristic: they think long.
That demands that leaders ask themselves four honest questions:
Most programs get stuck on the last two - because they've only ever measured what's easy to count. They've never built the infrastructure to measure what actually drives outcomes: the quality of the environment, the shared purpose, the culture where athletes know they are seen as people, not just performers.
I have walked into organizations with championship banners on the wall and a culture quietly in decay. I've also seen programs with modest resources consistently outperform their talent - because every person in the building understood why they were there and felt genuinely valued.
The difference was always the courage of leadership.
Without the courage to prioritize mental health and wellness - top to bottom, not just when it's convenient - you relinquish your leadership responsibility. You choose to hope everything is fine. You choose to think your athletes are okay.
Hope and think are not strategies. Know is a strategy.
A poor culture does not lead to diminished results. It leads to no chance.
If you are a coach or a leader in any discipline and you are unable to place the well-being of your athletes at the forefront of everything you do - you are compromising the very reason you are there.
It is not about the position of leadership that you own.
It's about the disposition of leadership that you bring.
I spent decades earning positions. What I understand now - and what I wish I had understood earlier - is that disposition is the thing that actually matters. It's what your athletes feel when they walk into the building. It's what determines whether they trust you enough to tell you the truth about how they're doing. It's the invisible architecture of everything you're trying to build.
The organizations that get this - that invest in the mental environment of their programs with the same seriousness they invest in physical development - are the ones that will define what elite sport looks like in the next decade.
We are laying the foundation. Let's build something that lasts.
Tom Renney is a Senior Advisor to HONE Athletics. He served as Head Coach of the Vancouver Canucks, Edmonton Oilers, and New York Rangers, represented Canada at the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympics, and served as CEO and President of Hockey Canada.