Jim Waite

With decades of experience as a player, an umpire, and a coach, Jim Waite is one of Canada’s most well-known curling personalities who brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the Golden Hawks High Performance Centre.

As a player, Jim has qualified on 12 different occasions for the Ontario men’s provincial championships, and has won five Ontario provincial titles including the honour of representing Ontario at the 1968 Brier, throwing second stones for the Don Gilbert foursome out of the St. Thomas Curling Club, where they finished with a 6-4 record behind the winning Alberta rink skipped by the legendary Ron Northcott. As an umpire, Jim has served as Chief Umpire at five World Curling Championships and six Canadian championships.

However, in more recent times Jim Waite is much better known as a high-performance coach. Jim holds a Level 5 coaching certification from the Coaching Association of Canada and is currently the High Performance coach for the Ontario Curling Association. He has served as the National coach and team leader for Canadian championship teams at the world level since 1993, and has coached Canada’s Olympic curling teams in the past four Olympic Games, starting in 1998 in Nagano with Mike Harris, in 2002 in Salt Lake City with Kevin Martin, in 2006 in Turin with gold medalist Brad Gushue, and again with Kevin Martin in 2010, earning the gold medal for Canada at the Vancouver games.

Since 1993 Jim has directed the Trillium high-performance curling camp in Guelph, which he founded, and has served as a director at the Amethyst camp in Sudbury since 1994. Jim is the proprietor of Performax Coaching Inc., a company specializing in the coaching of high-performance athletes. He appears as a motivational speaker at various events to speak on the Olympic experience, coaching, team building, and a variety of other topics.

In addition to his wealth of experience in curling, Jim holds a 3-handicap and is five-time club champion of the St. Thomas Golf and Country Club. Since 1991 he has been the head coach of the University of Western Ontario golf team, leading Western to OUA golf titles in 2001 and 2010.

Jim resides in St. Thomas, Ontario with his wife Sue and has two married children, Chris and David.