Great friends, great memories and a few championships along the way.
It’s been a 45-year journey for Doug Woodward as a teacher and coach at New Westminster Secondary School. Over the years, he’s coached football, track and field, and volleyball, but he eventually found his groove coaching girls’ basketball after seeing how it was done in Japan.
Woodward travelled to New Westminster’s sister city in Japan, Akita, on a student cultural exchange program in 1979, and it was during this first trip that he saw their highly successful girls’ basketball program. He remembers going to their practice, entering the gym, hearing very loud music and seeing more than 50 girls doing drills. He was impressed by the discipline and focus and the respect the youth showed their coaches.
That inspired him to coach girls’ basketball at New Westminster Secondary.
From then on, he took teams every second year to Japan, and every second year, teams from Japan came to New West.
Over a career that has spanned five decades, he’s coached three generations of girls with daughters and eventually granddaughters of his former players coming through his basketball program.
“We’ve had so many great players… that has kept me going,” Woodward said. “[As a coach] you see a lot of success – we loved winning, we loved competing.”
Seeing his former basketball athletes succeed professionally, grow as people and have families has made it all worthwhile.
While Woodward liked coaching boys as well, girls are more expressive of their appreciation, he said, pointing to the walls of his office filled with birthday greetings, posters of teams and other memorabilia made by his girls’ teams.
Woodward grew up in Burnaby and graduated from Burnaby South Secondary in 1967. He graduated from the University of Hawaii in 1972 and started teaching that same year at New Westminster Secondary. That year he also signed a contract with the B.C. Lions, but he played only one month before being injured and making the decision to be in the gym teaching and coaching high school students instead.
Woodward’s coaching style changed over the years as he gained experience and saw different teams coming through.
“I was tough at the beginning – later on, I started softening,” Woodward said. “My poor first teams. What I know now and what I knew then [is] night and day.”
While his technical coaching might have been good in the early years, he learned to focus more on defence and the team aspect rather than just individual players.
Highlights from his coaching years include the Lower Mainland championship in 2001 when his senior girls’ team beat Argyle in the New West gym, as well as the 2008 junior girls Lower Mainland championship.
Woodward has written his resignation letter a few times over the years, but it never left his home. But this past October, he was walking down the empty halls outside Massey Gym at New West Secondary and it clicked for him – it was time to move on.
A retirement party will be held for Woodward this Saturday, June 9, from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Massey Gym at NWSS.
