Lisa (Ouellet) Labrecque cringes, just a little, as she recalls one of her earliest elementary track and field memories – perhaps not the most sportsmanlike approach to handling a second place finish.
“I was always competitive,” laughed the former track & field and cross-country star, now mother to a quartet of athletes every bit as multi-sport oriented as she was.
Labrecque is also one of only four SDSSAA athletes who has captured at least three medals at OFSAA track & field championships dating back to 1978 – Robert Esmie, Rebecca Johnston and Lauren Fearn being the others.
She was also every bit as naïve about being equipped with any kind of relative perspective on outstanding performances on the tracks and trails as were most grade nine student athletes in an era where locating records and previous results was not simply a tap of the keyboard away.
“My goal (going into high-school) was to play basketball at Lasalle – that was the big sport,” recalled Labrecque, who too silver in both the 400m (JG – 1994) and 800m (SG – 1995) distances before ascending to the top of the mountain in the latter in her final year as a Lancer, winning gold in 1996.
“Peter Hocking (long-time Lasalle XC – Track coach) would send letters to anyone in grade nine and I thought the chance to run on trails would be fun. I had never, ever run cross-country.”
“My first race was at Lasalle – we would run up the Cambrian road and at that time, there was a trail in the bush and then you came back down Barrydowne and back to Lasalle,” continued the NCAA relay gold medal winner during her time with the Michigan Wolverines.
“I remember I had basketball practice that day so I ran in my basketball shoes, the big shoes with the tube socks.”
Taking first place in her first ever cross-country race, she sauntered nonchalantly back to practice.
“I remember telling Mary Collinson (that I had won) and she seemed (pleasantly) surprised that I had beaten grade 13s,” said Labrecque. “I had no clue.”
“I won the cities that year and ended up winning NOSSA and finished eighth at OFSAA. I thought that was terrible.”
Now able to seamlessly cite results and opponents who would move on to future greatness, Olympians and the like, Labrecque can laugh these days at how little she knew of the landscape of what would become her post-secondary sport.
In many ways, she is also somewhat thankful for the bliss of ignorance.
“Peter Hocking and Lisette Bernier did a great job; they had an amazing indoor track program.” Labrecque noted. “We would run indoors three times a week (during the winter) and they would bring us to a pile of indoor meets. We would go down to Toronto and get our butts kicked – but it was fun.”
Such was the support system around her.
Even as she transitioned to Track North Athletic Club after hitting the OFSAA podium for the first time in grade 11, the influence of a big picture track mentor was huge. “Dick (Moss) had me so grounded,” said Labrecque. “I had all of these mental cues in my races.”
And it wasn’t like the home setting was ever going to be an issue.
“I had zero pressure from my parents,” she beamed. “As long as we were having fun, it was good. They let my coaches’ coach and they were parents.”
Through it all, she continued to play high-school basketball, her team walking off with bronze in her grade 12 season with (Ouellet) Labrecque attracting the attention of legendary Laurentian women’s coach, Peter Ennis.
“I knew that if I was going to continue a sport after university, it wasn’t going to be basketball,” said Labrecque, who would represent Canada at the World Cross-Country Championships in 2004 and 2005.
“There just wasn’t the opportunities.”
And so it was that track excellence became achievable – especially from the time she joined the local club crew. “It was unbelievable improvement,” she recalled. “I was running a 2:23 (800m) when I joined and in a year and a half, I was down to 2:09.”
If there was a lack of awareness of where she stood in the pecking order early on, such was not the case as Labrecque completed her fifth and final year at Lasalle, having finished second to future Olympian Carmen Douma at the all-Ontario high-school meet the year before.
“I was ranked #1 but I was not the defending champion – but we were close, within a half second,” said Labrecque. “I knew that she was going to take it out fast. She was an 800m/1500m runner where I was 400m/800m. I sat right on her until the final 100 metres – and then sprinted past.”
Yet for as clear as the memories were for those special races, the truth is that pretty much every element of her high-school track and field career brings a smile to the face of Lisa Labrecque.
“The city meet, the city relays were just so much fun because everyone knew each other,” she said. “I raced against Nancy Coté (mother of hockey stars Alex and Kalia Pharand) and Cheryl Savage (now Cheryl Fabbro). It was just that environment with all of those girls.”
“And all of the track people I ran with at my age, our kids are now competing against each other in different sports, which is fun.”
It’s no coincidence that the word “fun” creeps its way into this conversations multiple times over. A strong advocate of limiting single sport specialization until youngsters reach their mid-teens, at the earliest, Labrecque can draw on first hand knowledge, having finished dead last in her first 800m OFSAA appearance in grade nine.
“Yes, I did get so much better, but where did all of those other girls go?”
Where indeed.
