Soroka is literally bouncing as he arrives at the Canadian Sport Institute Calgary, the training home for many of the nation’s Olympic winter sports athletes. It’s hard to miss his six-foot-five frame moving with a cheerful gait and large grin on his face. He’s wearing a black pea coat, black pants and dress shoes, and a collared shirt with sunglasses hung from the top button hole. In his right hand is a plastic Shoppers Drug Mart bag containing workout clothes. After he greets Reitsma and waves to the trainers, he’s chirped by one of them for his formal attire. “It’s not a suit!” Soroka responds. “I told you: I was at a luncheon.” He came straight here from a donor appreciation event for KidSport Calgary.

After Soroka changes, he begins to stretch and walks near the bench press, where he gets chirped again. “You don’t do bench presses,” says Quin Sekulich, a strength and conditioning coach at the complex. “What do you mean?” replies Soroka. “I could, but you won’t let me.”

Bench presses are not part of Soroka’s routine because they don’t suit his physical makeup. The trainers giving him a hard time all know that, though — these jibes are delivered with love. “Coming back to roots is important,” Soroka says. “I’m treated the same way here — year in, year out — by the people that allow you to be yourself and understand who you are and keep you in check, too.”

He has trained here for the past six years, rubbing elbows with all types of athletes, from Calgary Stampeders quarterback Bo Levi Mitchell to Olympic gold medal wrestler Erica Wiebe to bobsledding tandem Alexander Kopacz and Justin Kripps. Sports physiologist Jeff Osadec, who has trained Soroka since 2015, recounts a story from the pitcher’s first workout this off-season: “We’re looking at this kid who just had an amazing season and he was asking everybody how their seasons were,” Osadec says. “It wasn’t about how his season was. It was, ‘Oh, how did you do?’ He’ll come up and talk to Erica about wrestling — the Olympic trials are coming up. He wants to know how the alpiners did. He talks to the bobsledders. He’s asking about all this stuff. One of the guys looks at him and goes, ‘What are you doing back here? Shouldn’t you be going somewhere warm?’ He goes, ‘I live in Atlanta. It’s warm all the time. I was ready to come home.’”