Ryan Hinds quit the CFL to become an agent of change
October 7, 2021
While packing to drive to training camp in Ottawa in May 2016 for the Canadian Football League (CFL) season, Ryan Hinds had a change of heart.
Coming off a championship season with the Edmonton Elks which won the Grey Cup the previous year, the Toronto resident suddenly didn’t feel that strong connection to the sport.
“At first, I was so excited about going to Ottawa,” the 35-year-old said. “Then all of a sudden, I started to think about the amount of value I was going to bring to the team and other things I wanted to do.”
After notifying his agent about the reversal, Hinds called Ottawa Redblacks General Manager Marcel Desjardins to say his heart was no longer in football.
“That was a difficult conversation because we had just met,” he recalled. “I let him know that I didn’t want to play football anymore. While I still loved the game, there were other interests that I wanted to pursue.”
Very few athletes retire from their sport while at the top of the mountain.
In two seasons in Edmonton, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats second round pick in 2009 made 42 tackles.
“The high of winning a championship and not wanting to leave the sport is so alluring,” said the retired defensive back. “Once you reach that level, you want to go back and try for a repeat.”
Hinds had other interests outside football.
Ryan Hinds with his wife Faye and parents Ecliffe and Roxanne (Photo by Ron Fanfair)
As a member of the Tiger-Cats, he helped teammate Jonathan Hood expand ‘The Ahead of the Game Youth Mentorship Program’ designed to empower young people and promote positive change.
“In early 2016 while I was doing that program and seeing all the different changes we needed to make on such a macro scale, it was hard for me to take my mind off that,” Hinds pointed out. “You have to be all in when you are playing professional sport. There was part of me that was ready to go out and start effecting change in other ways. That was sort of what made me realize that it was probably not a good idea to return to the sport. I may have been good for the first couple of months, but I knew I would have wanted to explore those opportunities outside football.”
While Ottawa went on to win the Grey Cup in 2016, he was happily enrolled in the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health Master of Health Science in Administration program that combines health policy, business & management.
“This program helped me transition from football into really understanding the health care system and the gaps within it,” Hinds, who was the recipient of the Tiger-Cats Tom Pate Award for Outstanding Sportsmanship and the Charlotte Simmons Humanitarian Award in 2012, said. “It also gave me a better grasp of how underserved communities were served by the health care system and what I needed to do to help change things.”
Enhancing and protecting community health and well-being is the primary focus of public health.
Hinds’ interest in the field grew while supporting Hood in the youth mentorship program.
“We were making changes on a micro scale in the individual lives of students and teachers,” the Guyana Help the Kids ambassador said. “That was really rewarding, but sometimes I felt as if I was fighting a fire with a water gun because there was so much change that needed to happen and we were only making this change through one-on-one exchanges. That was valuable but there was definitely a systematic and system-level change that needed to occur. It was at that time that I asked myself how I can get into a system and public health to make change on a broader level to help underserved groups get the outcomes they were looking for.”
After completing the two-year graduate program, Hinds was an Adjunct Lecturer and Assistant Professor for 27 months at the Dalla Lana School before being appointed its first Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (EDI) last July.
“This is a real cool opportunity for me to help shape the scope of the role and how you think it might best serve the school based on what it is doing and what enhancements need to be made,” he said. “There’s a lot of good work already happening at the school to improve the experience for ethnic groups. I see my role as devising a more cohesive strategy around how the school addresses equity, diversity and inclusion. Once there is a clear understanding of what’s been done and what needs to be done, mapping out a plan for us to get there is important. I think there’s a lot of support at the school for making improvements, but what’s needed is a sustained and coordinated push.”
Playing a team sport, Hinds believes, will help him thrive in his new role.
“Regardless of personality or other differences, there’s no way you can be successful on the football field without being able to work together,” the 2020 Louise Lemieux-Charles Health System Leadership Award recipient said. “I know that will be critical in this role.”
Dr. Onye Nnorom, the Black Physicians’ Association of Ontario President, welcomed Hinds’ appointment.
“The fact that the Dalla Lana School of Public Health finally has this EDI Director position is a step in the right direction, but that's not enough,” she said. “A lot of EDI positions are intended to be 'corporate window dressing' with no real institutional motivation for real change. Ryan is clearly a man of action and he has a great track record for being an agent of change. I'm happy to see a Black man in this leadership role, but I'm particularly delighted that it is someone who has been involved in meaningful change 'on the ground' and in health leadership.”
Migrating from Guyana with his family in 1994, Hinds lettered in football, basketball and track at North Toronto Collegiate Institute and secured a scholarship to attend the University of New Hampshire where he successfully pursued a pre-medical degree in Biology.
Making four interceptions and 53 tackles as a senior, he was selected 13th overall by Hamilton.
The plan, said Hinds, was to play two years in the CFL before going to medical school.
“I really thought I was going to have a short stint in football,” he said. “I, however, enjoyed playing the sport and really made some great connections. Football opened the door for me to do some things and that made it difficult to walk away. I am super grateful for the opportunity to play in the CFL and the exposure I gained through the league. I wouldn’t be here without it.”
After three years with the Tiger-Cats, he signed on with Edmonton midway through the 2013 season.
Ryan Hinds was a member of the Edmonton Elks that won the Grey Cup in 2015 (Photo contributed)
A career in medicine, for now, is no longer on his radar.
“I have fallen in love with the opportunity for system change and I really like the notion of having a broader lens on how to make change,” the former Toronto Central Local Health Integration Network (LHIN) Community Engagement Lead said. “At the Dalla Lana, I have that chance to do that for the next wave of professionals coming behind me.”
While grateful for the opportunity to play in the CFL and be the Dalla Lana first permanent EDI Director, Hinds is very mindful of the sacrifices his parents made for him and his three siblings to thrive in Canada.
Duane Hinds and Sabrina Callaghan are teachers while Chenelle Hinds-Gore works in the banking industry.
“I really can’t say enough about how important my mom and dad are to anything that I do,” said Hinds whose wife, Faye, is enrolled in the Canadian College of Naturopathic Medicine Doctor of Naturopathy program.
“It wasn’t until I got older that I recognized the sacrifices they made coming from Guyana where they had good jobs and were doing very well. To just leave that, come to a new country with four children and start from the ground up is something that I really didn’t recognize and appreciate earlier on in my life. To their credit, they never let us know about that. They just did what they had to do for us to succeed. That’s such a great demonstration of selflessness that I don’t take for granted.”
Ecliffe and Roxanne Hinds (Hill) worked in the insurance and banking sectors respectively in Guyana. She was also a Guyana field hockey captain in the1970s.
