For many years, Cindy Eadie established herself as successful two-sport athlete, competing in softball at the 2004 Summer Olympics and playing with the Laurier Golden Hawks team and winning the U Sports national title in 2005.
However, Eadie, initially became involved in sports because of her siblings while growing up in Brantford with a focus on keeping in shape.
“My older brothers and sisters played a lot of sports, and it was natural for me to follow along with what they did. They really liked hockey and baseball/softball, like most Canadians…one sport in the winter and one in the summer. My sisters were also heavily involved in dance, and I did that for quite a while as a child. There was always a focus on staying active and being involved in physical activity while having fun. There was never a goal of taking it to competitive levels,” Eadie explained. “We were really lucky being in Brantford. When I was a kid, my hockey coaches were Larry and his son Corey Hill and Robert Martin. They coached me for close to ten years. We had a really good group in the hockey program, and we stuck together through the years, and then I eventually became a goalie and really fell in love with that position.”
As Eadie played hockey in the winter months, she would gear up for softball during the summer season.
“I got my start in the T ball program, and then moved into girls’ softball…I had some really good coaches like Ross Enslev when I played in Brantford. The team ended up disbanding due to low enrollment at the rep level when I was about 12 years old. So, I ended up going to London at that point and eventually to Brampton when I was 14 and finished playing there until I made it to the national team,” she recalled.
However, Eadie then decided to tryout for the women’s national softball team in Kitchener.
“They had several tryouts in different areas and one closest to us was in Kitchener. I signed up and ended up performing well enough to make it to the next stage. They called me back and did well again. I look back and I think my tryouts went the way they did because I had no pressure on me and I didn’t have the expectation of making the team,” recalled Eadie. “I would then get asked to attend the final selection camp out in British Columbia and I made it to the development team which is the national’s ‘B’ team, in that first year. Earlier into the season, the third baseman on the senior national team suffered an injury and wasn’t able to return. I was then called up to finish the summer, competing in two tournaments…and that’s how I got my start.”
Nevertheless, Eadie praised her time with the national team for building a winning culture.
“Softball Canada was great to us. They brought in highly knowledgeable coaches who were able to develop the team…when I started on the team around 2001, Canada finished eighth at the 2000 Olympics, so there was certainly a lot of room for improvement, and that was the focus of the program,” she said. “So, the coaches that were brought in were already established in winning. They were excellent players themselves back in the day, and many of them transitioned into coaches of winning programs at universities across the United States and they really helped us get to the next level. At the end of the four-year cycle, we ended up with a fifth place finish at the Olympics in 2004…showing that we made some strides there.”
During the team’s time at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Eadie recalled a few games that stuck with her.
“The game against Greece was really pivotal for us. We ended up losing that game, but during that time we knew we needed to win that game to have our best shot at advancing to the playoff round. There were a handful of games that we felt that way about, but our game against Greece was one of them…we knew it was going to be a close game. I believe we lost by one run,” she recounted. “Another game would be on the flip side of that against Chinese Taipei. We needed to win that game, and we were the ones who came out and really took it to them, and we were able get the win. And there was the game against the United States. We knew that one was going to be tough. It ended up being tougher than we thought. They absolutely handled us. So that was not a good feeling.”
Nevertheless, while Eadie cherishes the experience, a lot of her teammates, like herself, were rookies.
“I remember the Olympics just being a bit of an emotional roller coaster. Because there weren’t that many players on our team who had done it before. We had a small number of repeat Olympians from Sydney, and most of us were just doing this the first time and I think we were showing our rookie status at times especially when the pressure came and the key moments happened…sometimes we excelled and sometimes we crumbled a little bit, which is exactly what you expect from rookies sometimes,” Eadie said.
Eadie would end up leaving the team after the World Championship in 2006, however, she still reflects on the one-in-life-time experience of going to Athens.
“It was surreal to be there. I don’t know if I truly appreciated it in the moment as much as it as I do now…because I was just a kid. We were playing at the highest level of competition in the world…and I was just playing at the best level that I could and just trying to win every day and just being there for the team in whatever capacity they needed me..but it was definitely an amazing experience being in Greece and being able to compete at the highest level,” she said.
When it came to hockey, Eadie played as far as she could in Brantford and went on to play for the Mississauga Ice Bears and the Brampton Thunder which were part of the National Women’s Hockey League. She would eventually choose Wilfrid Laurier to do her studies and play hockey.
“I played there for several years with Mississauga and Brampton and again, I was lucky to have had some fantastic coaches who mentored me. And with Mississauga, which was part of the senior league was where many Olympians and college players played after they went to school. So, I wanted to be part of that, and I got my chance when I was 18,” she recalled. “I just played one or two games with the senior team during that time, and Rick Osborne was the head coach of that team who would be my coach at Laurier down the road. The next year, I was recruited by a handful of schools, but nothing felt right except Laurier. Bill Bowker, who was the head coach of the program at the time, was persistent, and wanted me to be part of the team. And I felt it was the perfect fit, with softball still being top of mind, I could play on a rising hockey program, do my studies while being close to home, and train.”
During Eadie’s first year at Laurier, she was coming onto a team that was mostly rookies, but still managed to get to the national championship game and by the second year, making it to the OUA finals.
“I was one of 14 rookies which was a bit of a strange situation. The year prior, there were a lot of players who graduated, but then also there were just a lot of changes that coach Bowker wanted to make to the program to get them to the next level. There were a few players that I actually played with, in Mississauga and the junior team that were recruited as well,” explained Eadie. “So that was nice to have some familiar faces, and one of them being Ashley Stephenson, who was a top-level defenseman, team captain and the soul of the team during the time that she was there…but being one of 14 rookies, as you can imagine, there was a lot of work to do, and wasn’t very easy for a first-year student-athlete to manage everything.”
By the third year, Eadie didn’t roster for the Laurier team as she was training for the softball Olympic team.
“I would be centralized in British Columbia for training for the Olympics, for softball. So, I was not part of the team in the 2003/04 season…I was just on the periphery there which allowed me to practice with the team, but I wasn’t playing, of course. Then in January, that’s when I left to go out west….it was a chaotic year for the team, but when coach Osbourne took over the program…things started to settle and they actually finished that year with a decent record, given everything that had happened. It’s not easy to change a coaching staff halfway through the season,” she said. “Jim Rayburn, our assistant coach, went out and recruited and secured a bunch of great players during the off-season who meshed well with the existing players…and this greatly helped us get that national championship against the powerhouse Alberta team in the 2004-2005 season. That was just a matter of starting from the clean slate and with a really solid roster because we had the players who had been there since I started. There were a few bumps in the road, but we had really good leadership from not only the hockey program but also from the athletic department. I have to tip my hat to Peter Baxter, who was the athletic director at Wilfrid Laurier and he studied that whole situation, while we were in between coaches and obviously hiring, the right people for the job.”
After graduating from Wilfrid Laurier and leaving the national softball program, Eadie, who would also being inducted in the Brantford and Areas Sports Hall of Recognition in 2011 as well as Wilfrid Laurier’s Sports Hall of Fame in 2014, started to look at her options for the next steps in her career with the Zone Training based in Waterloo.
“I ended up getting connected with Derek Obermeyer through mutual connections, and he was starting a hockey training business. Once I was done with softball in 2006, I started at the Zone full-time, because I really loved the business. I was also teaching and also coaching a little bit at that point; but the business had evolved to the point where they needed full-time office staff. So, naturally, I threw my hat in that ring to manage full time,” she said. “I’ve been overseeing operations in our Waterloo location for 20 years now and helped open the Guelph location 10 years ago, which I also manage. Both locations have been doing great and recently Derek and I partnered on a new project to do a multi-sport facility in Kitchener. It was the same concept as the Zone, but now just focusing on kids’ programming as well as introducing people to the sports and just having rental space for adults who wanted to play. But it’s a multi-sport version, so it’s called Rookie & Ace Multi-Sport in Kitchener, and we opened just last summer, and it’s been going really well.”
As Eadie explains, the focus of the new sports programming has been to get kids learning about different sports.
“Throughout the eight-week program, the kids will be playing four or five different sports. So, whether it’s basketball, floor hockey, baseball, or soccer…the whole point of the class is to get the really young kids in, who don’t know what they want to play yet, and introduce them to as many different sports as possible. And hopefully, that will nurture their development, and spark an interest in playing a sport or several of them,” Eadie said. “Because, like in my situation when I was a kid back in Brantford, all it took was playing and trying out several sports which ultimately got me interested in hockey and softball. And for me, I just wanted to be involved in sports and I ended up pursuing it and making a career from it.”
