McMahon Honoured
by Allan Besson
Winnipeg Free Press
June 16, 2010
WAYNE McMahon got his first taste of the Legion Athletic Track and Field Camp in the International Peace Gardens in 1964 as a 13-year-old athlete. Since then, the veteran coach with Winnipeg Optimist Athletics and the University of Manitoba, has missed only one year, and that was due to the fact he was travelling with the Canadian national team.
"It was an experience that I enjoyed, and a lot of people I met there are close friends now," said McMahon, 59, "and I continued to go back there each year right through high school.
"After that they brought me back to work on equipment and things, and then in 1972 one of the coaches got sick, and so they asked me, because I was taking a phys-ed degree and had a track background, to step into a coaching role. I guess that makes it 37 years of coaching at the camp."
On July 14, at the Camp, the Royal Canadian Legion Sports Foundation will present McMahon with its 2010 Coach, Athlete, Promoter (CAP) Award for his outstanding service in the roles of coach, athlete and promoter of a selected sport.
Born in Winnipeg but raised in Boissevain, McMahon went to high school at Brandon's Vincent Massey, but continued to attend the summer camp from 1963-69. In 1972, the same year he won the Canadian junior national 3,000 metre steeplechase title, he returned as a coach, and has been the head coach of the advanced program since 1979.
McMahon was sold on the camp from Day 1.
"As an athlete it was the good coaching, and the chance to run, and be with the best athletes," he recalled. "Later, as a coach, I saw the other side. One of the best things was to work with other coaches. I'd spend a week down there coaching with someone and I'd really get to know them. I'd learn a lot about of how they coach, whether it is philosophy or technique, and it left me excited, positive and with some things I wanted to try."
McMahon's coaching resumé includes various national appointments highlighted by a European tour and Pan Am Junior Games, along with four Canada Summer Games and three Western Canada Summer Games. McMahon has been Athletics Manitoba's Coach of the Year on four occasions, and won the Athletics Canada's 3M National Coaching Award for Developmental Athletics in 1992. Going back over his years at the camp, McMahon says so many great Manitobans put in time there. He singled out Shilo's Angela Chalmers, a 3,000-metre bronze medalist at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and decathlete Mike Smith of Kenora.
"He came to the camp when he was 12 years old, until he was 17, and he rose to second in the world at one of the world championships," he said.
McMahon will be back again this year, but developing athletes is no longer his only goal.
"For the last three or four years I have been trying to work a lot with younger coaches," he said. "As coaches I think we need to mentor the next group coming up. Part of what we do is make ourselves replaceable."
