McKay riding off into the sunset

Larry McKay has no interest in self-promotion.

When his retirement was announced last week, a nine-paragraph news release summing up the end of a 35-year career as head coach of the University of Winnipeg men’s volleyball program was more than enough.

He was going out on his own terms — quietly and, hopefully, with as little fanfare as possible.

McKay, who turns 59 later this month, will remain on the job until July.

It is believed the school will hire an interim coach for the 2024-25 season before conducting a national search for his permanent replacement in the new year.

“It’s always a process you’re going through, especially year’s end and season’s end,” McKay, explaining his decision to retire, said recently. “The evaluation, that’s not new, and every every year I’ve gone through that business has led me to continue on. This year, it was weighing the pros and cons, and it was a very, very close decision.”

Widely regarded as a master tactician and skilled in the area of player development, McKay admitted there were parts of the job that didn’t come easily.

“There’s an urgency to this job that doesn’t leave you,” he said. “There’s so much that you do in the community, and with player development, player retention, player recruitment, that has so much urgency to it — especially for an insecure, introverted person. So, those aspects really weigh on me a lot.

“They’re very, very challenging for me, so the urgency was always there. It still is. I’m on the job for another month and I still feel it all the time.”

McKay’s reserved coaching style, like his origins in the profession, were far from standard. A moderately successful high school playing stint was followed by a university career as a University of Manitoba practice player — he dressed for only one match in four seasons —and team manager under the tutelage of head coach Garth Pischke. That eventually led to an assistant coaching gig with the Bisons.

“I was very fortunate that Garth made room for me in the program,” said McKay. “I put him on a very high pedestal. He was the best player in my mind ever that I knew of at the time and then his program at the U of M was so consistent. They were always winning or losing in the finals at nationals. And so I was grateful that he he let me in the gym. I really wanted to see what he did. And then I was grateful that he let me be on the bench in matches because I wanted to hear what he had to say.”

During the same period, McKay also persuaded the U of W’s successful women’s coach, Mike Burchuk, to allow him to watch and learn at Wesmen practices.

In 1989, U of W athletic director Aubrey Ferris tabbed a 24-year-old McKay to succeed Dave Unrah as the men’s coach. Pischke and McKay, once close confidantes, became rivals.

“I always figured Larry was going to coach forever because you watch him on the sidelines and he’s so calm and collected all the time, and here I was throwing my clipboard and kicking volleyballs — just still being a player, I guess,” said Pischke. “And then he calls a timeout, but he wouldn’t go in the timeout. He’d just sit on the bench. But it worked. It worked for him and it worked for his style.”

The Wesmen went on to win two national championships during his tenure. McKay was also named national coach of the year three times, most recently in 2017-18.

His influence on others in the sport is far greater than a mere summary of his accomplishments. Many off-seasons were spent coaching various teams in the national program and he frequently showed up in high school gyms, imparting his wisdom on younger players.

“Larry’s style as a coach is unlike any other coach I’ve been around,” said Vincent Massey varsity boys coach Marshall Jones, who played for the Wesmen from 2003-06. “For me, it was a good way. I think that’s part of Larry’s brilliance is that it’s super unique and he’s not afraid to try innovative new things. He’s always been attracted to just doing things different than other people.”

McKay made demands on his teams that helped to make them greater than a sum of their parts.

“I don’t think he was the coach to try to give his players all the answers as to what they needed to change or do,” said Dustin Schneider, the star setter of Wesmen squads that won nationals in 2007 and earned the silver medal in 2008. “In my opinion, he was great at putting you in situations where you realized quite quickly that you were either good at something or you had deficiencies in something and then he gave you the opportunities to fix it and get better.

“With our group specifically, he did a lot of his coaching with us in practice — he let us compete a ton. And in the games, he often let us have a lot of leash and I think what it did was just made us an exceptionally confident group.”

Brent Corrigan, who has served as a volunteer academic advisor to the men’s program for 11 years, marvelled at McKay’s willingness to tell inconvenient truths.

“I think he’s probably an easier guy to coach with than to play for,” said Corrigan. “Because he treated all those guys as adults — right from Day 1. It was like, ‘I’m not dealing with your parents. I’m dealing with you.’ And he held a mirror up to an awful lot of players and showed them things that they didn’t particularly want to see. But I really think that for anybody who went through the opportunity to play for Larry, they came out of (the experience) better for it.”

McKay also had an uncanny ability to mould unheralded prospects into fine university players.

“He wins with guys that I don’t think other programs across the country necessarily would be lining up to get,” said Jones. “I was there as a serving sub and liberio. Dustin Schneider ended up being one of the best setters in the world but I don’t think Dustin was recruited by any other university in the country.

“Dan Lother was 5-7, 5-8, and minus a back injury was the probably best player in the country. Nobody else recruited Dan Lother. Justin Duff started in the Olympics and he was a project when he came first to the U of W.”

Added Pischke: “They were kind of a blue-collar team — a team that always worked hard and it was so darn hard to win in their building because they just wouldn’t give up. His teams were always like that. They just worked really, really hard and never let the game slide at any time.”

That gritty Wesmen attitude, more than three decades in the making, was a reflection of their coach’s drive.

“We definitely knew that he didn’t have this illustrious playing career,” said Schneider, who went on to play nine years for the national team. “But I think that was perfect for the mentality of the guys that he had on his team. We were always more of a misfit crew than then other teams and it just kind of added, I think, to the chip on our shoulders.”

mike.sawatzky@freepress.mb.ca