Happy anniversary, coach

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/08/2015 (3936 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Media was always easy for Brian Dobie, going right back to the start, back to when he first met reporters as the University of Manitoba’s football coach.

It was May 1996, and headlines trumpeted the new Manitoba coach as a fresh start for a once-troubled program. It was an interim job, but the Bisons called a news conference at a south Winnipeg hotel to show him off. The way he spoke to reporters then — freely, and with feeling — would become his signature.

“What we need to do in Manitoba is renew some of the old pride that’s been laying dormant in this province,” Dobie said then, and pledged integrity.

Looking back now, “It was almost surrealistic,” Dobie said. He had it all, in that moment: the Bisons job he’d applied for twice before and wanted badly, and his family. His wife, Jackie, was beside him, carrying their daughter, Caleigh. She’s now a linchpin Bisons volleyball libero, but in 1996 she was just a baby.

Another thing that’s surreal to him, now: some of the Bisons who’ll be carrying the load this season weren’t even born when that press conference happened.

Well, happy anniversary, coach. The 2015 campaign, which kicks off in Saskatoon Sept. 4, marks Dobie’s 20th at the helm. It’s a milestone he’s quietly eyed for years, though he wasn’t always certain he’d make it this far. Not that he ever intended to leave: this gig, he says, is the only one he ever really wanted.

No, seriously. Though he’d sure enjoy a CFL pay grade, he quipped, trying to move up the ladder was not for him. He never even tried. (Truthfully, even setting the actual football part aside, the easygoing and irrepressibly open coach would chafe under the more stage-managed spotlight of the pro game.)

“I love this program,” he said. “This was a life goal for me. I never wanted to coach in the CFL, I never wanted to coach in the CIS. I wanted to coach the University of Manitoba Bisons. And this, hopefully, is where I’ll either retire from… or get fired from, one of the two.”

Once, that latter option seemed more of a possibility than it does now, right when the optimism of that first press conference came crashing down. Dobie, fresh off 21 years of coaching and teaching phys-ed at Churchill High School, came into the U of M brimming with a plan to build an all-Manitoban powerhouse.

The reality was tougher. The Bisons won three games in his first three seasons, a paltry handful of victories sandwiched between two 0-8 campaigns. Dobie found himself in over his head, unaccustomed to the level of university play — even a level that, he says, was much lower than it is today.

Halfway through that second winless season in 1998, then-Bisons athletic director Walter McKee called the coach into his office. Dobie, heartbroken, prepared for the worst. Even he thought it might be best if he got canned. “Everything was going downhill,” Dobie said. “It felt like the world was collapsing.”

That meeting would prove a turning point. Dobie confessed to McKee he didn’t think he was the right man for the job; McKee pushed his chair back and laughed. “Brian, relax,” he told the down-and-out coach. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. We have faith in you.”

The next season, the Bisons went 5-3; in 2001, with an all-star roster that included Israel Idonije, safety/punter Jamie Boreham and record-smashing quarterback Shane Munson, the Bisons stampeded to the Vanier Cup final. They haven’t gone 0-8 since, and Dobie has long since settled into his role as captain of the ship.

In total, the Bisons are 79-71-1 in regular-season play under Dobie’s tenure — and 76-50-1, if you ignore those messy first three seasons. They’ve captured three Canada West conference titles, most recently last year, and won the national championship Vanier Cup in 2007.

‘I never wanted to coach in the CFL,

I never wanted to coach in the CIS.

I wanted to coach the University of Manitoba Bisons’

— Bisons football coach Brian Dobie

So what changed, after those dismal early seasons? “I realized, I’m in big trouble here,” Dobie said. “At that point, I recognized very quickly that wow, I’m just a part of it. I knew that I had to go out and get really, really good people.”

Shortly thereafter, Dobie hired assistant coaches Vaughan Mitchell as offensive co-ordinator and Stan Pierre, who co-ordinates the team’s defence. They’re still with the Bisons now, and Dobie credits them with a big part of the program’s stability. Oh, he also realized his original plan to have an all-Manitoban squad was a bit… misguided.

“That’s not a knock on Manitobans,” Dobie said. “Look at the Manitobans that have come out of our program. But to supplement the outstanding players we had here, that combination changed our program. Realizing the intensity at this level, I didn’t understand it (at first). I had to work my way through it.”

The CIS coaching job has changed a lot since Dobie took over. In 1996, he was trying to lead a team out of a mouse-infested shed beside the old Bisons stadium, and flying around the country to lock up promising high school athletes wasn’t really on the radar.

Now, the team is spread out in a sleek complex beneath Investors Group Field, and the work of finding the next recruit class begins in earnest almost the moment a season ends. The pressure ratchets up every year. The investment — and, concurrently, the stakes — in CIS sport is only growing greater.

For a guy who’s never been shy, it’s worth it. Football has consumed so much of Dobie’s life over the last 19 seasons, he jokes, he doesn’t have any other friends. What he does have: his assistant coaches and an ever-growing list of current and former standout kids, the players who light up the stories he spins. And of course, there is his family, the same two women who were beside him back in 1996. They’re still beside him now — when they can be, anyway.

“It’s so hard on families, and they either fall apart or they’re strengthened by it,” he said. “My wife and daughter, what they’ve had to put up with… coaching families are unbelievably strong. Because it’s so selfish in terms of what you need to do as a coach to run a program. And to me, that’s huge.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca