‘That’s the real task at hand’

Forty-eight hours before his first season as head coach of the Winnipeg Sea Bears begins in earnest, Mike Raimbault sits in his office nestled inside the University of Winnipeg’s Duckworth Centre, deciphering what to tackle next on his laundry list of to-dos.

Months of evaluating, negotiating and game-planning are set to go from paper to the court when his eclectic group of players begin a short, three-day training camp inside St. Paul’s High School on Thursday, but the 45-year-old appears poised and in total control of his surroundings.

Raimbault, who also wears the title of general manager, looks to be at peace with the roster decisions he’s made and confident about the ones he’ll have to make in the coming weeks and months.

Then again, he might just have a good poker face. While his desk is organized, Raimbault admits his brain can get scattered these days.

“Don’t let me fool you,” he said, cracking a grin.

Every day brings something that Raimbault hasn’t experienced in his 20-year head-coaching career. In a time of unpredictability, the only certainty is that he’ll be kept on his toes.

And when you’re balancing the demands of a pro team and fulfilling tasks as the head coach of the Winnipeg Wesmen men’s basketball program, things can stack up in a hurry.

On Tuesday, he set his phone down for an hour while putting Teddy Allen through a workout, only to come back to three texts from senior director of business operations Megan Noonan, two from communications manager Emily Tham and one from assistant GM Alex Campbell about a player’s flight being delayed.

Raimbault’s afternoon was just getting started. He handled media duties, then led a spring training session with the Wesmen, which he still does three times per week during this stretch of the off-season.

He is also balancing the normal life duties of being a husband and a father of a pre-teen girl whose extra-curricular schedule might be busier than her dad’s.

“There are a lot of nights where I’m just a dad, I’m an Uber driver getting my daughter to soccer and basketball practice. And that part is super healthy in terms of balancing all of the other demands,” Raimbault said. “I just try to be locked into whatever I’m supposed to be doing at that time. I think navigating her schedule has been equally as challenging as anything else.”

Make no mistake: Raimbault is living the dream that he set out to reach as a young guard playing for his hometown Brandon Bobcats.

Raimbault made it clear that he didn’t hesitate to take the Sea Bears’ job. He, of course, needed to clear it with the powers that be at the U of W, and his wife, before accepting. It was important to him that he maintained his job with the Wesmen, and it didn’t take him long to accept once he got the green light.

When Sea Bears’ owner David Asper proposed the partnership, it was the first time that Raimbault had been offered a head job of a professional squad, which might come as a shock given his impressive track record in Canadian university sports.

Between his start in Brandon — which began as a coach with Neelin High School’s junior varsity team, learning under legendary coach Don Thomson before breaking into the university ranks — his move west shortly after where he led the University of Northern British Columbia to a Canadian Collegiate Athletic Association national championship, or his time with the Wesmen — where he has spent the last 17 years and produced one of the most consistent programs in the country — Raimbault has posted just two losing seasons as a head coach, and none in the last 14 years.

“I wouldn’t say that it was a definitive goal (to become the head coach of a professional team),” Raimbault said.

“When I first heard that the team was announced, obviously, you think about, ‘Hey, it’d be super cool to have an opportunity to do that,’ but I just came into the experience three years ago, trying to do my best to help everybody that I could. And I’m just super fortunate now to have a chance to do it.”

When the time came to name a new head coach, Sea Bears owner David Asper made it clear that Raimbault was a front-runner from the get-go, adding the club needed, “some prairie dirt, Canadian Shield and wheatfield soul in our DNA at this time.”

“A lot of people always ask me, ‘How do I become a coach?’ And there isn’t just a clear path of you get this degree, and you put your resumé here, it’s you have to be very fortunate — right place at the right time,” Raimbault said. “And so, for me, I always tell people I just got really lucky.”

Call it luck or something else, Raimbault didn’t dip his toes in the deep end before making an early splash when he signed Xavier Moon, a three-time CEBL Most Valuable Player with a skill set that can captivate a fan base. A move that might have appeared unlikely, given Moon hadn’t played in the CEBL since 2021, suddenly became a statement from the first-timer.

“I wouldn’t say that I ever felt grounded or stability through the process of building the team, if I’m being very honest. It’s been so many moving parts and a lot of work going into identifying the guys that we have coming in,” he said.

“I think there’s still a bit of a whirlwind going on with some of those things, but obviously it was an exciting part of building the team and getting to know him and his story.”

He did it again when Allen, the sharp-shooting guard who captured the hearts of Winnipeg fans en route to an MVP season of his own in 2024, agreed to return after an ugly split with the club. In many ways, Raimbault has already earned his stripes as a recruiter.

But, for as much as he has enjoyed learning the ins and outs of building a pro roster, he says that he’s now able to do what he’s best at: getting a group to buy into a message and leading it.

“I wish it would be as easy as just saying, ‘This is how I want it to go,’ and it goes that way. You have a vision of the way you want to play. I mean, we want to play hard, we want to be physical, we want to be unselfish. I think it’s just all the little parameters of the things that you have to do to win basketball games, the unpredictable pieces,” Raimbault said.

“We have a lot of people coming together in a short amount of time, so how quickly can we become connected and on the same page? That’s the real task at hand.”

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