Over the past 32 years, Bob Gardiner of Dundas Valley has coached just about everything: football, soccer, girls hockey, ultimate, water polo, touch football and basketball. This lengthy career culminated this week with him being named 2024 winner of the Wismer Award for High School Coaching Excellence.
Cathie Coward The Hamilton Spectator
Nominees for this year’s Wismer Award include (from left) Saltfleet’s Kristina Alderdice, Westmount’s Paul Guagliano, Westdale’s Cindy Myers, and the winner from Dundas Valley, Bob Gardiner.
Nominees for this year’s Wismer Award include (from left) Saltfleet’s Kristina Alderdice, Westmount’s Paul Guagliano, Westdale’s Cindy Myers, and the winner from Dundas Valley, Bob Gardiner.
He was a late hire and didn’t get assigned to his first teaching job until the middle of September. On Day 1, his first job was finding the staff room. Followed immediately by tracking down the coach of the football team and asking if he could help.
“He pretty much handed me the clipboard,” Bob Gardiner laughs.
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Not everybody begs to coach. Yet for the next 32 years at Waterdown, Parkside and then Highland (which became Dundas Valley), he never stopped. There was football, there was soccer, there was girls hockey, ultimate, water polo, touch football and basketball.
This lengthy career culminated this week with him being named 2024 winner of the Wismer Award for High School Coaching Excellence. Which provided a perfect bookend to a story that was launched largely because he loved playing sports as a student at Parkside once upon a time.
Over the past 32 years, Bob Gardiner of Dundas Valley has coached just about everything: football, soccer, girls hockey, ultimate, water polo, touch football and basketball. This lengthy career culminated this week with him being named 2024 winner of the Wismer Award for High School Coaching Excellence.
Cathie Coward The Hamilton Spectator
“I liked school,” he says. “But I lived for what was going on after school.”
Thing is, if he loved doing it and this wasn’t a chore, is there really a need for an award?
Darn right, there is.
Coaching may indeed have been a joy — as it has been for the other finalists: Kristina Alderdice of Saltfleet, Paul Guagliano of Westmount and Cindy Myers of Westdale — but it’s not easy. It wasn’t easy in decades past and you could make a compelling argument it’s tougher now than ever.
With rep sports becoming more and more expensive, high school athletics are now the only opportunity available to many kids to play organized games. That makes it particularly painful to cut someone who might not be all that good since you might be denying them their one exposure to being part of a team.
However, including them means spending considerably more time on fundamentals. Teaching Sport 101. You can’t just tell a brand-new football player to run a slant or a post. You have to explain it, demonstrate it, drill it, refresh it and practise it. Which takes time away from planning strategy.
Meanwhile, most teams will also have kids who are playing on club programs outside of school. These students already have an understanding of the game and an expectation of being challenged. They don’t want to spend time learning the basics of how to do a layup when they’re already dunking.
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“The spectrum has widened,” says Alderdice, who’s coached field hockey, track and field, volleyball, girls hockey, badminton, soccer, rugby and touch football for 25 years.
Cater too much to the latter group and the beginners get left behind and lose interest. Spend too much time on the former cohort and the top players can start feel like they’re wasting their time.
Oh, and don’t be fooled. Winning matters to the players whether they’re beginners or experienced. Which adds another layer of complication and expectation to the equation.
It’s a difficult recipe. Especially when you ask coaches to run teams in a variety of sports. Because nobody is expert in all of them. Just look at Guagliano’s resume.
Over 30 years at a variety of schools, he’s done girls and boys volleyball, ultimate, soccer, badminton, tennis, girls hockey, cross-country, and track and field with considerable success.
Then they asked him to help with water polo.
“Oh,” he said. “Water polo? OK. I know how to swim.”
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He’d never played. Had never even seen a game. Didn’t know how long the quarters were. So he had to sit down and learn the rules. Then figure out how to coach it. Which involves a ton of prep and a bunch of study and a load of commitment.
Any coach that can do that while keeping both ends of the ability continuum (as well as all those in the middle) happy in a variety of sports deserves all kinds of praise and thanks.
“You have to work really hard as a coach to come up with that magic,” says Myers, who spent more than 20 years coaching volleyball, track and field, beach volleyball and unified sport, which brings together athletes with and without intellectual disabilities to compete. “It’s rewarding when it works.”
Of course, we haven’t even mentioned the thousands of hours longtime coaches sacrifice in addition to the decision to voluntarily take on the roles of amateur psychologist, tutor, counsellor, esteem-builder, personal trainer, consoler, disciplinarian, scheduler, booster, motivator, fundraiser and in some cases, parent whisperer.
With all that going on, a Nobel Prize may be in order.
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