The curtain on the dynamite daddy/daughter basketball show at Gleneagle secondary school has come to a final close.
Take a bow, Doug Binns.
After 34 years volunteering as a coach, including guiding Gleneagle teams since the institution opened in 1997, the 56-year-old Binns has stepped down as the senior girls team guru after building one of the model high school hoop programs in the province, one that hit its zenith with the Talons' 2006-07 run to glory and subsequent second-place showing in the climactic B.C. AAA tournament.
That campaign, his cast included two of his daughters, Kelsey and Sarah, along with other key players, Amonda Francis and Sam Macaventa. Kelsey and Sarah have since travelled to toil in Canadian university hoops with Montreal's McGill Martlets and Edmonton's Alberta Pandas respectively.
After Binns' youngest daughter, Alyssa, graduated from Gleneagle a year early and latched on with the UBC Thunderbirds' hoop team in the fall, Binns decided it was time to shift his focus from coaching basketball and pass the torch to a willing Patty Anderson, Gleneagle's athletic director.
Binns will continue to serve in his job as Gleneagle's Career Preparation Facilitator, for obvious reasons. The Binns gals -- Kelsey, 20, Sarah, 19, and 17-year-old Alyssa -- all have a considerable distance to go before post-secondary graduation.
"As long as my girls are in university, I have to pay the bills," Binns said, with a slight smile. "My whole attitude's changed so much.
"There's life after basketball and it's so nice to see my daughters go through the transition themselves."
Binns began his conversion to manhood when, at 18, he left his family home in Trail, where his parents ran a floor-covering business, with three bags of belongings and hitchhiked his way to Vancouver, where he enrolled immediately at UBC.
Upon graduating with an education degree four years later, he was hired as a teacher at what was then Newton junior high school. He quickly caught the coaching bug, inspired by a clinic he took that was headed by 'Dynamic' Dan Miscisco, an energetic, long-time North Vancouver basketball coaching king-pin who continues to run summer sports and learning camps.
"I saw 'Dynamic' Dan and said, 'Yeah, I could do that,'" recalled Binns, who horsed around in athletics as a youngster but was never part of an organized team. "But I really didn't know what I was doing. It wasn't as easy as I first thought.
"When I first started coaching, I thought if you just out-worked everybody you would win. But, no, you have to know a little bit, too."
Binns said he continued to frequent coaching clinics -- he counts having attended exactly 45 of them -- in order to strive to do his sideline role justice. The closest to that, perhaps, came when he steered Gleneagle's junior girls team to a provincial crown in 2004, when Kelsey was a Grade 9 standout.
Binns merely shrugs at having coached seven different prep school sports -- golf, volleyball, rugby, badminton, netball and track and field -- but admits basketball was the one he was most keen on learning and teaching. While he concedes his passion, persistence and no-nonsense approach drew some detractors along the way, Binns keeps in memory and on electronic file the many, many more who appreciated him for his dogged approach and dedication.
He forwarded a copy of an email he received shortly after the Sr. Talons' runner-up provincial showing in '07 from Port Moody's Alex Devlin, a former Canadian national basketball team player and a long-time coaching great and mentor in the Tri-Cities himself.
"The consistency, pride and determination your girls displayed was a credit to the coaching staff and the character and make-up of your girls," Devlin wrote. "You did an amazing job with the talent you had and, while many will only measure the year on winning the big prize, your girls deserve so much credit for what they went through and what they accomplished. You may not realize it yet but, with time, you will have a wonderful appreciation of what your team was able to accomplish."
Binns said he's already starting to get a sense of that.
"I'm feeling the love from my past players now much more than when I coached them," he said.
Perhaps his greatest compliment came from one of his own quite recently, who looked her dad dead in the eye and said she'd gladly play under his tutelage again -- anytime, anywhere -- regardless of the level.
Kelsey told him: "You were serious as heck but you also made it fun."
Binns calculates that he and many other high school coaches spend 400 hours per season, "from start to finish," volunteering for their school team. It sounds like a lot because it is, and Binns is already finding a few ways to utilize the extra hours now, largely by taking over some of the home-making duties that were previously reserved primarily for his wife, Sue, a city of Coquitlam employee.
"I make dinners and walk my dog a lot," said Binns, who's stricken with arthritic knees that his border collie/golden retriever, Joker, happily helps keep limber. "And I get out to watch my daughters' teams play as much as possible, or on the internet."
And he unplugs at night knowing he served his teams and players to the very best of his ability for more than three decades.
