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.
0 comments:
Post a Comment