UFV prof, former Cascades coach Bertram helps Olympic snowboarders master the mental game

Last Sunday evening, as the Canadian men's snowboard team prepared to hit the snow in Beijing for the slopestyle competition at the Winter Olympic Games, Dr. Chris Bertram found himself in much the same position as the average Canadian sports fan – parked on his couch, staring at the TV.

Unlike the average Canadian sports fan, Bertram was watching the action with a heightened level of personal interest and behind-the-scenes knowledge.

For the past four years, the associate professor in the University of the Fraser Valley's Faculty of Health Sciences has served as Skill Acquisition Lead and Flow Coach with Canada Snowboard, working particularly closely with athletes in the slopestyle and big air events as they worked towards the Beijing Games.

In his day job, Bertram's PhD in skill acquisition is put to use in research labs and classrooms, but he relishes opportunities to test-drive the concepts he teaches in real-world settings. It's this mindset that led him to spend 15 seasons (2005-2020) as the head coach of the UFV Cascades golf program, and has now steered him to the role with Snowboard Canada.

"My career has followed a bit of an unusual path, in that I've always walked with a foot in the academic world and a foot in the applied world," he says. "Profs don't usually coach varsity teams, for instance. It's not a normal thing to do, what I was doing there with Cascades golf.

"The reason it become so interesting for me is, number one, I love being a part of a team, and I love competing and winning big championships. But I always saw it as a living laboratory. I'm really interested in how the brain works, and how we perform our best under pressure. It's one thing to tackle that question in a research lab – it's quite another to see it firsthand with the people who are in the arena, putting it all on the line.

"I've learned more from being in the heat of battle with athletes than I ever did out of a textbook."

What Bertram learned during his time with the UFV golf program not only informed his academic practice, it also yielded great success on the golf course – he nurtured the Cascades men's and women's teams from humble beginnings into powerhouses that earned a combined 12 conference titles and five national championships.

Now, having taken a step back from Cascades golf in 2020, he's savouring this new opportunity to put what he's learned to work at the highest level. The opportunity to be part of athletes' Olympic journey, he says, is surreal.

And on this particular Sunday evening (Monday morning Beijing time), seated on the couch alongside his wife Kara and their two young daughters, he'll see how the lessons he's learned – and the tools he's tried to furnish his athletes with – translate from the grass to the snow.

'There has to be a relationship element'

In a nutshell, Bertram's work both the academic and athletic worlds deals with how to learn faster – optimizing the process, and then delivering when the stakes are high.

And in creating the ideal skill-acquisition environment, a crucial element is how people relate to those around them.

"The real breakthrough when I was with the UFV golf program came when I landed on the realization that a team of talented individuals isn't going to get you where you want to go, necessarily," he says. "There has to be a relationship element and a cultural element, and that was a real turning point for us. We had some very talented teams on paper filled with individuals who were quite good. We just couldn't push it over the line.

"In 2013, when we won the CCAA national championship for the first time with our men's team, on paper we were strong, but we weren't that strong. But the thing was, it was a group of people who were willing to fight for each other and cared for each other.

"When you get the culture right, it breeds trust, and that trust helps filter out a lot of the background noise that trips up athletes or teams in the moment. When you have trust, it sets the stage for full commitment and focus. To me, that's the centre of the bullseye when it comes to performing under pressure."

That big idea – that a supportive team environment can accelerate skill development – is something Bertram has seen regularly in his work with Canada Snowboard, and the culture of the sport lends itself to this.

The 51-year-old was "too old", he says, to get into the snowboarding scene in his youth – he was in his late teens when snowboards first showed up on ski hills. Nowadays, when he attends training camps with the Canadian snowboard team, he hears no end of heckling from the athletes as he traverses the hill on skis. Yet as a longtime surfing and skateboard enthusiast, he recognizes and appreciates the overlapping cultural elements, which helps him relate to the athletes.

"The world of snowboard is interesting," Bertram says. "Most of them are professional athletes, and they do their own thing when they travel and tour, but they're also part of our national team.

"The culture of snowboard, though, is such that everybody is kind of there for each other, and they're just as happy to see their friends win – even if they're from different countries. You watch the finish line at the Olympics – everyone is there at the bottom waiting to see if they'll get bumped off the podium, but they are so fired up when somebody does something special. There are going to be never-been-dones at the Olympics in snowboard this year, as there always are, and you'll see people getting bumped off the podium just as stoked for the one who lands that massive trick or that perfect run.

"You see that same thing in the training environment. There's no formal structure around it, but there is this camaraderie that's based on the culture of the sport itself that I really love. That's an important piece. When it gets going – when one person does something really cool in a training session – you can just see it build. Then somebody else does something, and the momentum starts to grow. It happens almost every time we're on the snow, and that propels the sport forward."

In his time with Canada Snowboard, Bertram has observed that Mark McMorris – the Olympic and X Games legend from Regina, Sask. – is often the one who lights that fuse for the team.

"His nickname is Sparky for a reason," Bertram says. "He often sparks the vibe and the flow of the sessions. He's the nicest human being and one of the most generous guys you'll ever meet, but he also sets a certain tone in how he carries himself, and how he shows up prepared and gets ready to go. And then when he starts doing big things, throwing big tricks and all the rest of it, you can feel the momentum of the group start to build.

"Everyone gets hyped, and the level of the whole group goes up. It's really cool to watch."
 

'The holy grail is flow'

Bertram isn't just helping athletes learn faster – he's trying to teach them to be able to execute those skills in high-stress situations. And it's hard to envision a higher-stress spot than standing at the top of an Olympic snowboard run, about to put your body into mortal peril with the eyes of the world upon you.

"It's amazing to watch people in the moment bring themselves to point their boards downhill into a 250-metre in-run, into a jump that's got an 80-foot gap," he says. "And if you're a couple feet short or a few feet too long, very bad things happen. I've seen when things go a little bit wrong, and it's scary as hell.

"I think people have a lot of misconceptions that these people are fearless and that they're adrenaline junkies, but that's not at all the case. There is fear everywhere. The thing that we work on is, how do you overcome that? How can you look fear in the eyes, manage it, and still execute? That's the thing. You can take the lessons from an environment that's that high in consequence and apply it to every part of life. Managing the stress response is something that goes across all of society."

Indeed, Bertram not only applies his learnings to the world of sport, he also does work for Exos, an international performance company based out of the U.S. that manages corporate wellness for organizations like Intel and JPMorgan Chase.

When it comes to harnessing the power of the mind and optimizing mental performance, Bertram is a big believer in availing oneself of all the tools in the toolbox, including classic sports psychology. His expertise, though, involves more of a bottom-up strategy – can a person be taught to shift their brain into an optimal state?

"In the context of learning, there's not usually a lot of stress," he says. "A lot of days you show up and you're tuned out or you're not really feeling it. In moments like that, we have to figure out, how do we turn the dial up? How do we get optimal brain neurochemistry going and shift the state of the brain so it's receptive to learning?

"Now, we shift into the competitive environment, where the stakes are higher. Then we have to figure out, how can we turn that dial down? Now, we're getting all that adrenaline for free because of the moment, right? Stress shows up – the mind starts to go stir-crazy, and we get a little tight in the body. What can we do there to maybe turn the dial down and get us into that high-performance sweet spot that we call flow?

"To me, the holy grail is flow, and that means a very specific thing to me."
 

Whether you're watching a golfer standing over a putt, a basketball player going through their routine at the free throw line, or a snowboarder preparing to drop in, they're all in search of "flow", whether they know the term or not.

That in-the-zone feeling was once assumed to be something that happened at random, when all the stars were perfectly aligned. But with advancements in neuroimaging over the past decade, Bertram has come to understand the brain mechanisms that are occurring when flow shows up.

Flow comes with its own distinctive electrical signal emanating from the brain, and Bertram illustrates that to his athletes with a unique drone-and-headset system. While wearing a headset that reads electrical waves, Bertram's charges use a variety of techniques – visualization, breathing practices, and/or eye movement among them – to shift their brain to a flow state. When their brain is on that ideal wavelength, the drone goes airborne. The subject is literally flying the drone with their mind.
 

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"Typical neurofeedback is a low-res avatar running across a computer screen in a psychologist's office, and that's not very compelling, especially for snowboarders," he explains with a chuckle. "Originally the drone was a tool I used to engage them.

"It's a very powerful thing for an athlete – or any person, really – to learn that they can intentionally shift their state of mind and point it in a more optimal direction. They can train themselves to prime their system for flow state, and increase the probability that it shows up when they want it. Over time, it becomes a skill that anyone can get better at.

"It's really about accessing performance on-demand. We have a saying: Flow, then go."

'Just so much fun'

Which brings us back to Sunday evening in the Bertram residence, with Chris on the couch with his family, awaiting the start of the Olympic men's slopestyle event 16 time zones away in Beijing.

Bertram is but one member of the large integrated services team supporting Canada's snowboarders, including technical coaches, medical staff and sports psychologists. With limited numbers on site in Beijing due to COVID-19 protocols, he's continued his work with the team via the remote video apps we've all become so accustomed to over the past two years.

He watches as the Canadian contingent starts somewhat slowly – Max Parrot sits third after the first run, with McMorris fifth and Sébastien Toutant seventh.

Parrot, though, lays down an epic second run and becomes the first rider to break the 90-point barrier, earning 90.96 from the judges. That would hold up as the gold medal-winning score – an incredible story fashioned by the Bromont, Que. product who endured a bout with cancer three years earlier.

McMorris, the most decorated Winter X Games athlete ever, comes through in the clutch, grabbing the bronze medal on his third and final run. Toutant – the 2018 Olympic gold medalist in the big air event – finishes ninth overall.

With each clean run, the Bertram clan is off the couch, cheering. It's a great start for Canada Snowboard, with more to come, including the highly anticipated big air events.

In a quiet moment, Bertram pulls out his phone and shoots messages to Parrot and McMorris: Congratulations – now it's time to regroup.

"Watching the guys meet the moment and execute under those conditions was just so much fun," Bertram says afterward.

"One of the most powerful and fulfilling things you can do with your work is to feel you're having an impact. To be a part of someone's Olympic journey is pretty profound, and it's certainly something I'm really proud of.

"The things I get to see, and the people I get to talk to, it's pretty cool."