Men's basketball: Horwood hanging up his whistle

Until Danny Cleary raised the Stanley Cup last June with the Detroit Red Wings, Alberta Golden Bears coach Don Horwood might have been one of the best-known sportspeople to come from Carbonear, N.L.

The three-time CIS champion coach , at age 62, has given his word that he is retiring at the end of this season, his 26th at the U of A. Mark Wacyk did a profile on him early last season at cishoops.ca (disclaimer: Anything we post on men's basketball pales next to Wacyk's work and is mainly an attempt to continue his legacy) that summed up how Horwood got traction as a coach almost 40 years ago.
"I happened to read an article in a publication put out by Simon Fraser University and Jon-Lee Kotnikoff about how the British Columbia High School Basketball Tournament was the most exciting event in Canadian basketball and I wanted to be where the action was. I answered an ad to coach at Oak Bay H.S. in Victoria and not having ever been west of Ontario in my life, I knew little else about B.C. basketball other than that article I had read. Little did I know until after I got there that I was replacing Gary Taylor, a coaching legend in B.C. high school basketball who was taking over the UVic job ... The program was a power house and I later found out that no one else had even applied given the pressure and profile of the job. I was 22 years old and was literally shaking when I arrived because I didn’t know anyone.
Reading that, you get a window into the kind of confidence it takes to coach a team for one season, never mind 40. It is going to be strange in February and March to not be able to say, you can never count out a Don Horwood-coached team.
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