By Charles Lefebvre

Former CFL player brings message of hope and resiliency to students

Sep 17, 2018 | 4:04 PM

MEDICINE HAT, AB — A former CFL player is in Medicine Hat all week, spreading a message of hope and overcoming obstacles to students.

Former Canadian football player JR LaRose spoke with students at Medicine Hat High School on Monday afternoon, sharing stories about his life, his struggles and his accomplishments.

“The message is, if you were to sum it up, it’s of hope,” LaRose said prior to his presentation. “The tagline is ‘don’t allow your situation to become your excuse in life.’

“We all come from different walks of life, but if you want something bad enough, you’ll find a way to make that happen.”

LaRose is a member of the One Arrow First Nation in Saskatchewan. He grew up in Edmonton, raised by a single mother who was a survivor of the residential school system and struggled with addiction (his father was deported back to Nigeria before he was born).

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LaRose says the most important lesson he wants students to take away from the event is how to be resilient.

“All of us, at some point in our lives, are going to be faced with different situations, and it’s never having that victim mentality,” he said. “If we have that victim mentality, we continue to lose. It’s being able to overcome. And how do we do that? I think it’s finding your ‘why’ in life.

“For me, growing up without a father, I knew one day I was going to have kids, and I wanted to be the best father I could be. That’s really my why, is not having my kids go through the things I went through as a child.”

The event is part of the Medicine Hat Public School Division’s First Nations, Metis and Inuit Guest Speakers Series, which aims to break down negative stereotypes and introduce students to positive role models from a cultural perspective, according to a news release from the division.

LaRose played in the Canadian Junior Football League, where he won the 2005 Canadian Bowl with the Edmonton Huskies. He spent nine seasons in the CFL with the Edmonton Eskimos and B.C. Lions, winning the Grey Cup with the Lions in 2011.

“There’s so many life lessons through sports,” he said. “You talk about accountability, being accountable to your teammates, having to face with adversity. For me, the biggest thing that sports did for me, it gave me an outlet. I was an angry child, and for me, football was a place where I was able to take out a lot of my built-up aggression.”

LaRose will be speaking at other schools in the Medicine Hat Public School Division throughout the week.