The University of British Columbia Athletics

This past Saturday Deb Huband won her 400th career game as head coach of the UBC women's basketball program. Sports information assistant Lachlan Kerr had the opportunity to sit down with Deb, now her 19th season as head coach, to talk about her playing career, her 400 wins at the helm of the Thunderbirds program and the team's chances of silverware heading into the playoffs.
 
It was actually her education, and not basketball at all, that first brought her out to the west coast. Having obtained her undergraduate degree from Bishop's University in Quebec, she elected to pursue a master's degree is Speech & Audio Pathology at the University of British Columbia.
 
"I was still playing for the national team at the time, and doing a lot of my training on my own. After completing my graduate degree I was working out in Chiliwack, where I had landed my first job as a speech pathologist, and I obtained keys to the gym there and that's where I would spend my time working out.
 
I was playing for two club teams back then, one in Seattle, and one in Vancouver.  At that time there was a very competitive senior women's team in Vancouver that had national team players and that gave me some adequate training, but the rest of the time I was training by myself."
 
That was how things were back then, was it not? Professional opportunities for women athletes didn't present themselves in the same way that they do now and one had to hold down a full-time job just to make ends meet.
 
"There was always Europe," she reminds me. "That was the only option if I wanted to make some money from my sport. But I chose not to, I chose to do my master's and pursue the academic route."
 
Huband recalls with some fondness a few of her training partners as she looked to stay in shape and compete at the national level.
 
"We went to the community centre a lot and trained with teams from the men's leagues. I had a few Filipino buddies that I'd play with that proved to be great match-ups for me as a guard, we were closer in size to most of the men I'd play with and they kept me sharp."
 
The national team didn't have a base at that time. Players were expected to find teams to play for, keep their skills honed and their fitness levels high and turn up for a training camp before each major tournament.
 
Except for the Olympics; the grandest, oldest spectacle in sport was given special attention.
 
"When it came to the Olympics, the team centralized and we based ourselves out of Toronto. Players got leave from their respective jobs and we committed ourselves to training hard for it."  
 
Huband was a member of the national team for eleven years, and holds the Olympic experience very close to her. The Canadian team of 1984 finished fourth and that obviously features significantly as one of her proudest achievements as a player.
 
"Losing our final game at the Olympics was a big disappointment. Obviously it was a real thrill representing my country at the Olympics, but to me on a pure sporting achievement winning bronze at the World Basketball Championships ranks slightly higher. It's an event hosted solely for your sport, the best teams in the world are represented and you had to qualify to be there "
 
The Canadian women won bronze at the World Championships in both 1979 and 1986 and Huband remembers that first bronze causing quite the upset.
 
"When I came onto the scene Canada was known as a top six ranked team and one of the better teams but the US and Russia were the powerhouses in women's basketball. We had a few very special players and great team chemistry. At that first world championships, we were very much an unknown commodity and shocked everyone by being in the hunt for the gold medal."
 
Just one year into her international career, Huband had been named captain at the '79 Championships and led the team to the bronze medal.
 
"We were pitted against South Korea, the hosts of the tournament, thinking it would be an easy win for them and I remember some people being fired as we went on to beat them."
 
As she transitioned from playing into coaching later in her career, the successes that she achieved as a player did not come so easily or as quickly. She was first named an assistant coach in 1988 when Beverley Smith, a former national teammate encouraged her to join her staff when she took up the head coaching position at UBC. Smith left after one year to resume her own playing career and the job appeared to fall straight into Huband's lap. She was pursued to take up the full-time role but having just started out in her speech and language pathology career, she was hesitant to pack her academics in so quickly.
 
It was a full five years before UBC came calling again, but this time Huband felt ready to take up the mantle and accepted the position.
 
"I took the job on a trial basis in 1995 but kept my hand in with the North Vancouver school board who I was working for at the time. I made the shift to full-time not too long after and I've been coaching ever since."
 
She credits a man named Don McCrae as the person to whom she has learnt the most from about coaching. McCrae was the national team coach when Huband joined the team in 1978 as well as the men's coach at the University of Waterloo.
 
"A principled man of high values, he was a teacher of the game. He really opened my eyes to the game of basketball itself. Up until that point, I was just an athletic competitor who relied mainly on my athleticism and my desire. He provided me with a key to open up the mental side of the game. He was also the first person to expose me to world basketball.  That was an altering experience definitely, we get far too caught up in our own little world, but when you bust through those barriers it's a whole new education that you can learn from."


To this day, Deb Huband is the only person to have won both Coach of the Year and Championship MVP in CIS women's basketball. She appeared to be completely unknowledgeable of that achievement and wouldn't easily be pushed into revealing which award she held in higher prestige.
 
"They're both great honours obviously. The MVP was very interesting because we didn't actually win. Nowadays its unheard of to win a most valuable player award without actually winning the tournament. We played for Bishop's, a small university, and had only 8 or 9 players on our team and once we got out of Quebec to the national championships we realized there were some pretty good teams out there. So to win the MVP without winning the tournament, that's a tremendous honour."
 
So that's the award that has to mean more to you surely…?
 
"The Coach of the Year is a whole different thing altogether. It's much more challenging as a coach than it is as a player. As a player you can get out there and actually do things to make an impact; as a coach you have to teach and you have to empower. You have far less control, and it's up to the players to perform when you most need it. Basically, the award is an indication of how your team is performing and your chemistry, those sorts of things enable you to get a coach of the year award."
 
I'm still unsure, and I get the feeling she is undecided as well. Nonetheless, it is clear that she feels truly privileged to have been awarded two prestigious accolades.
 
That last award was over 10 years ago, and in the meantime she's been compiling some pretty impressive accomplishments here at UBC. Just last weekend she amassed her 399^th and 400^th win as coach. Huband has won three CIS national championships and three Canada West championships, and has led the team to multiple stints as the No. 1 ranked team in the country. With 610 games under her tutelage I could have forgiven her for forgetting a couple but she was able to pick out her most-memorable playoff, regular season and exhibition wins.
 
"For the playoffs it was a best-of-three series against Manitoba in 2004 when we clinched qualification for Nationals for the first time. We won the first game, lost the second game in the final seconds and had to play them again on the Sunday morning to decide who was going home and who was going to the nationals. It was here in War Memorial and we managed to hold on and book our place for Nationals and then went on to win the championship. That for me was the break-through moment where we finally managed to get out of our conference and experienced Nationals. We then went on to represent the Canada West three times in the next five years."
 
Regular season?
 
"One of the ones that stands out is against Victoria. Kathy Shields coached there and they were the standard then, they had won many national championships and she was a tremendous coach. She had previously been a national team player as well as national coach and an assistant coach while I was still in the national set-up. She was a mentor to me, and someone who had had an impact on me as a coach. So we had a great rivalry and they got the better of us in the playoffs mostly but we had some competitive league games. I remember hosting them here and it was a real defensive game. The half-time score might have been 19-13 and we had to keep it tight because we weren't so prolific offensively. But we were up and managed to win that game. That was definitely a big one."
 
And exhibition? Perhaps an NCAA team you weren't giving a chance against and managed to topple?
 
"It's always a thrill playing against a decent NCAA team and I remember we had the Air Force Academy team here one year (2006). We couldn't play at War Memorial because it was already booked so we played at Terry Fox high school. Air Force comes in thinking that they're just going to run over this Canadian team and they've just come from a training camp and we were still in 'summer-ball' mode at that stage. We were only training a couple of times a week and didn't have all of our players back yet. We ended up playing very well for 40 minutes and beat them. That was very fun, especially the surprise in their faces when they realized they were up against it and it wasn't going to be an easy game. I think we showed them that day that we could play basketball up here too."

With the season due to start the first day of November last  year, coach Huband returned from the summer break to find herself without four of last year's roster. Leigh Stansfield, the team's starting center, had graduated and was always expected to move on but Tori Spangiehl, Alyssa Binns and Zana Williams had hoped to return. They were left powerless in the decision however, as chronic injuries prevented them from returning to the court.
 
One could be forgiven in thinking that this year's team would find it hard to compete in a competitive Canada West conference with such a young and inexperienced roster. This group of players has stood up to the challenge and are currently tied for first in the Pacific Division with a playoff spot locked up two weeks ago. How far does coach Huband feel her team can go this year?
 
"We're a young team anyways, we have no fifth-years and only two fourth-years. We know that we're young and need to have some growth spurts and see some of those younger players step up and take on bigger responsibilities than they might have had to if we hadn't had some of those injuries. We feel like we have the talent, our younger players just need to become comfortable stepping into bigger roles."
 
"If you'd asked me a couple of weeks ago, I'd have said we were a ways away but I'm starting to see our depth players produce a little bit more. We'd certainly have to get on a good roll at the right time and stay injury-free. In those best-of-three series there is a lot of wear-and-tear, it's so key to stay healthy."
 
The Thunderbirds are rolling pretty well at the moment. They currently sit on a six-game winning streak, their best of the season – and next face UBC Okanagan who have not won a game in their last five attempts. Huband just needs this rich vein of form to continue well into the playoffs.