Salim Valji covers a Concordia Stingers football game as a journalism student in 2016.
Valji also learned to communicate in French, despite not having taken formal lessons.
“I had francophone friends in journalism school,” he explains. “And when we’d go out, I’d say ‘Can we speak French the whole night so I can practice?’ They helped me out a lot.”
After graduating, Valji took on a variety of freelance roles. These included working as a hockey statistician for TSN’s regional Montreal Canadiens broadcasts and contributing to prominent outlets such as ESPN and The New York Times from locations like Nashville and Paris.
Now based in Calgary as the regional bureau reporter for TSN, Valji covers the Flames, the Stampeders and other sports stories from Western Canada. Even in this unlikely setting, he puts his French to use. In 2022, he wrote a piece in English describing how the Habs’ head coach, Martin St. Louis, had been discovered by Calgary Flames scouts years ago. The journalists at the French-language side of TSN, called RDS, loved the story and asked him to recount it for their Montreal Canadiens pregame show.
“I took me a moment to say yes, because I had to fight through some nerves,” he says. “But it was awesome, and I’ve been back on RDS a few more times since then.”
The experience reminded him of his student days.
“Some of the trickier times in Montreal when I was trying to learn French and feeling like I wasn’t very good at it: they got me used to the feeling of pushing myself,” he says. “And that’s really cool, because that’s how you grow.”
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