LEAH STUART-SHEPPARD IS not your average student. By the time this local high school graduate heads back to university next month, she will have spent her summer brainstorming a better world with G20 delegates.

In fact, the 21-year-old, who is on a full scholarship at the University of Ottawa, has made it her mission in life to educate the world and make it a better place.

“Education helps create global citizens. It empowers people to change,” says Stuart-Sheppard, who dedicates much of her life to volunteering and educating herself.

She says she first learned the importance of both while attending Leaside High.

In Grade 10, she became involved with Adolescents for Community Teamwork (ACT), a school club that fosters local volunteerism.

As part of the club, Stuart-Sheppard was selected to do a leadership training program, which she says changed her life: “I began to see the importance of being aware of your community, being aware of how you are involved.”

Throughout high school, she volunteered with organizations such as Habitat for Humanity and Free the Children, offered tutoring services at school, babysat children at her church and worked with a local food drive.

Stuart-Sheppard says volunteering, specifically with ACT, also helped her gain an appreciation for international issues, so much so, that, when she graduated high school, she chose to study international development at the University of Ottawa.

After moving to Ottawa, Stuart- Sheppard started volunteering with a friend’s cousin, who heads the Canada-Mathare Education Trust, a non-profit organization that raises scholarship money for youth living in Kenyan slums.

It was also that cousin who suggested Stuart- Sheppard apply for something called the G(irls)20 Summit.

The brainchild of the Belinda Stronach Foundation, the summit brought together one girl from each of the G20 countries for a meeting of the minds. Stuart-Sheppard beat out hundreds of Canadian girls to become our country’s delegate.

Earlier this summer, she met with other delegates from places such as South Africa and Saudi Arabia to talk about issues including global education, health and the economy.

“What was really interesting was hearing the cultural side of things, the mix of different opinions and ideas,” says Stuart-Sheppard.

The girls followed a United Nations guideline and at the end of the summit had to make recommendations on how different global problems could be solved. According to Stuart-Sheppard, the summit reaffirmed the power of having a voice.

“It showed me the importance of focusing on breaking the silence,” she says, “of ensuring the opportunity for everyone to speak up and do what they think is necessary to realize their dreams.”

As for Stuart-Sheppard’s own dream? “Working in the field of education,” she says. “It’s a way to give people the tools they need to improve themselves … the starting ground for all change.”

HEY, THORNHILL: the dance world has uncovered the secret ballet weapon that few knew we had.

Sixteen-year-old Alys Shee, a longtime student at the Academy of Ballet and Jazz here in Thornhill, has been making a splash at several international dance competitions lately and recently caught the eye of the artistic director of the prestigious American Ballet Theatre (ABT) in New York City.

“I’ve been down to New York a few times to take some classes with Nancy Bielski, who is one of the trainers at ABT,” explains Shee, over the phone from the airport, where she is waiting to board a flight to yet another dance competition, this time the Cape Town International Dance Competition in South Africa.

“Wes [Chapman, the artistic director] saw me dance and said, ‘It’s too bad you’re Canadian, but we’ll put in a request for a work visa for you.’”

The invitation was a surprise to Shee, who is modest and down-toearth offstage. “I’m pretty shocked that they took me because I’ve never thought of myself in that way,”she says. “But they’ve always been one of my favourite companies.”

In the fall, visa permitting, Shee will be moving to New York to become a member of ABT II, the school’s apprenticeship program.

It’s no surprise that Shee keeps sailing through open doors on her pointe shoes. After all, she’s been training with the best for several years.

Thornhill’s Academy of Ballet and Jazz has a long and impressive list of alumni who have succeeded on an international level. The school was founded in 1988 by Russian ballet dancer Nadia Tencer, under whom Shee has been training since the age of nine.

Shee has also received private coaching and instruction for the past four years from Canadian ballet legend Evelyn Hart, a household name among dance aficionados. Hart has been made a companion of the Order of Canada, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Order of Manitoba. She’s also got a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame.

“Evelyn is an amazing dancer and an amazing coach,” says Shee. “Her technique was so clear and so artistic … and she’s always been able to articulate exactly what she wants.”

Hart has coached Shee to two silver medals at international dance competitions. Last year, Shee was awarded a silver medal at the Moscow International Dance Competition (the same medal that Karen Kain won at that competition in 1973; Mikhail Baryshnikov won gold in Moscow in 1969). In June, of this year, Shee won yet another silver medal at the U.S.A. International Ballet Competition in Jackson, Mississippi.

Shee loves the combination of private training and the regular classes she gets at the academy. “Nadia and Evelyn totally complement each other,” she says. “They want the same thing, but sometimes one can articulate it better and vice versa.”

As rewarding as private coaching with Hart is, Shee can sometimes find it lonely. “I like being in classes with other kids,” she says. “With Evelyn, it’s all private, but I have a lot of friends at the academy, and it’s nice to look around at how other people are dancing sometimes.”

Shee’s mom has driven her up to Thornhill from their house just south for her dance lessons every day since she began. All those hours in the car add up, but for Shee, “it’s totally worth it.”(Plus, she admits, it’s a good time to catch up on sleep.)

Shee first started dance classes at the age of three, and she took to it immediately. “The first ballet I saw was The Merry Widow, when I was around five,” she says. “But it didn’t paint how I felt about dancing because I already loved it.”

At 13, she got even more serious about dancing, leaving her Grade 8 class at the York School to study dance full-time and complete high school through online correspondence, a fact that she relates with glee.“I love it,”she says. “I don’t miss high school one bit.”

Up in Thornhill, Shee rarely leaves the dance studio, except to hit up the Ambrosia health food store across the street to buy candy with her classmates.

But Shee is quick to correct the image that comes to mind of a gaggle of lithe dance students nibbling on carob and pretending it’s candy. “It’s a health food store, but they sell real candy,” she assures me. “I don’t do ‘healthy’ candy.”

After the competition in South Africa, Shee goes on to the International Ballet Competition in Varna, Bulgaria, where her coach became the first ever Canadian to win a gold medal. The competition in Varna is the oldest and most respected in the world.

But for all the pressure she’s under, Shee is very down-to-earth in her attitude toward competitions. “For me, it’s just about getting up onstage and doing my best,” she says. “If someone beats me, it’s because they danced better than me.”

For example, she bears no grudge regarding her silver medal from the U.S.A. International Dance Competition in Mississippi in June. “The girl who was ahead of me deserved it,” she says. “She was stunning.”

Shee is enviably calm in the face of competition.“A lot of people like doing the competitions for the ‘bravo’ factor,” she says. “But for me, it’s just about getting the stage experience.”

Indeed, although she often travels to exotic places for these dance competitions, the “stage experience” overrides any local tourism.

“There’s no time to do anything except dance,” she says, of visiting locales such as Moscow where a less focused person might be tempted to duck out for a tour. “But it’s OK because I’m not there for sightseeing.”

At the same time, she doesn’t let herself get rattled by anyone else’s competitive spirit. “I really don’t see it as competition,” she says. “I know there are some girls who are kind of nasty, but for me it’s really just about getting out there and dancing.”

She’s even able to joke about onstage experiences that might have sent a less collected dancer weeping into the wings. “In Jackson, my partner’s dance costume got caught on my costume, and we had to rechoreograph the end of our pas de deux because we were stuck.”She laughs.“After the dance was over, they had to cut us out. I’ve seen that happen to girls, and they bawl their eyes out, but you just have to learn to work with those situations.”

But despite her preternatural poise and talent, in some ways Shee is a typical 16-year-old. In addition to the aforementioned aversion to “healthy” candy, Shee admits to plenty of time spent on the Internet. “Facebook probably takes up more time than anything else,” she says. “I mean, besides dancing.”

EVERY GAMBLER HAS a hard-luck story, and Daniel Negreanu, the boy from Bayview who became the best poker player in the world, is no exception.

Reached at his home in Las Vegas, the 37-year-old king of cards tells us how he first learned he has what it takes to survive in the high-stakes world of professional poker.

“The first time I went to Vegas, I was playing in a game with seven regulars, and it’s five in the morning and I’ve just spent the entire night getting kicked in the head,” recounts Negreanu, star of Million Dollar Challenge, the most popular poker television game show of all time.

“So I lose my last bit of money and go into the bathroom and wash my face, and when I get out, all seven guys were gone.It was the first time in my life when I was the sucker.”

At the time, Negreanu was only 22, and all the experience he’d had was found in the pool halls of North York and Bayview where he used to ditch school to play snooker.

A hometown hero, Negreanu thought he could bully the Sin City regulars like he’d done to his opponents at Leslie and Finch.However, Negreanu quickly learned he was swimming with a new breed of shark.

“I still remember those guys,especially Hawaiian Bill. He was killing me,” he recalls. “My goal from that day onward was to bust them all out. Eventually, I learned how to become a card player and not just be a bull.Eventually,I took them all down.”

Few players have taken down Negreanu, a card player with more than $12 million US in winnings (he’s the second highest earner of all time) and the founder of the Full Contact Poker website,an early adapter of poker’s wildly popular evolution online. Born at Bloor and Spadina,Negreanu was raised by his Romanian parents who came to Toronto to escape communism.

They may not have wanted their youngest to become a gambler, but they had to listen when he proved to them how seriously he was taking his work.

“My dad never worried about me.He made ends meet on the black market,but my mom, she worries,” says Negreanu, who calls Toronto a “gambling city” and says that his gaming awakening occurred when the charity casinos opened in the early ’90s at the skating rinks, hotels and banquet halls around town.

Negreanu ultimately came clean to his parents: he was going to drop out of school, move to Las Vegas and become a card player fulltime.

“My parents were like, ‘Daniel, go to school, forget poker,’ but then I showed them my books,” says Negreanu, who’s always kept detailed logs of his winnings and losings and was able to show his parents documentation of his dedication to straights, full houses and poker’s best hand, the royal flush. “Basically, I was playing cards like a real job,from noon to 8 p.m., 40 hours a week. I didn’t think it was the way I’d spend the rest of my life, but maybe, secretly, I did.”

Early on, Negreanu made several losing trips to Las Vegas and would return home to Toronto determined to build his bank and reap his revenge.

He says card players from Bayview have advantages over players from anywhere else in the world. Thanks to the area’s multiculturalism, Negreanu learned how to take down every manner of opponent.

“Take an Indian guy, he has different mannerisms than an Israeli; an Indian guy talks with his hands; an Israeli guy gestures a lot with his shoulders,” says Negreanu. “Playing in Toronto, you see different people, different cultures; you learn. This translates well to beating someone at cards.”

Pat Pezzin is a Toronto native and a professional poker player who’s been friends with Negreanu since the two were teens. Negreanu’s always been a hawk, he says. “When one tries to bluff Daniel, it’s very important to keep in mind not to engage in conversation with him,” says Pezzin.

“His personality makes opponents feel comfortable, and they unwillingly drop their guard and give off too much information to Daniel, who has an uncanny ability to read his opponents and sniff out a bluff.”

Negreanu won his first bracelet (the equivalent of a World Series ring in baseball) in 1998, becoming the youngest ever World Series of Poker champion at 24 years old. This was at a time when poker was beginning to be broadcast on Fox and ESPN,and thanks to video games and the Internet, poker suddenly exploded into the mainstream.

The boy from Bayview was now competing in popularity with professional athletes around the world.

“I’ve learned from Daniel how to approach the public and the media. It’s guys like Daniel that made this game popular enough to the masses to provide us young guys with better and better opportunities,”says Joe Cada, 22, winner of last year’s World Series of Poker, a rising star who’s earned $8 million US.

“I respect how Daniel’s always trying to change the game for the better. He’s helping to create the best tournaments and poker coverage, and he’s always working to make things better on and off the felt.”

Between the end of the 1990s and the mid-2000s, Negreanu was not only the most recognizable poker player in the world, but he also won the most titles.

Racking up bracelets (and big purses), Negreanu won the World Poker Tour twice, was named Card Player of the Year in 2004 and won the World Series of Poker three times. He’d done everything he’d set out to do playing cards.

“I killed everyone. I won four major events, Player of the Year — I won everything you could win and thought I was unstoppable,” says Negreanu.

“Then all the other stuff I was involved in got to be too much. I was spreading myself to thin, and I needed to refocus on my game.”Sometime between becoming the world’s best poker player and its most recognizable ambassador, a strange thing happened to “Kid Poker”: he began to lose.

“I was playing a lot on TV, doing this and that. Eventually people are going to catch on to your tricks,” says Negreanu, who today compares himself to Rocky Balboa in Rocky III, a champion who got a little too high on himself.

Negreanu’s competing obligations — managing his poker company,signing with PokerStars, filming Million Dollar Challenge and keeping up the public appearances — were starting to eat into his practice time. But like Rocky Balboa, Negreanu says the true test of a champion is how he responds to defeat.

“I came out of nowhere once before and killed everyone, now I’ve got to do it again,” he says. “After years of working on the television show and these other things, I’ve rededicated myself to each hand. If you don’t work on your game constantly,there’s no way you can stay on top.”

The last time Negreanu got angry, he swore he would mop up Las Vegas with Hawaiian Bill. He did that and more so, becoming one of the best poker players of all time.Now, with Kid Poker back to focusing on his card game, a word of advice: if you see the kid from Bayview at the table, it’s best to just pick up your chips and walk away.