‘Relentless recruiting’ and ‘pure energy’ drove success
There are certain drives — and a certain drive — that come to Dave Taylor’s mind when considering the career of Christine Stapleton.
“I still remember her driving to Moose Jaw at night after practices to watch (future star player) Andrea Gottselig’s softball games,” Taylor says, still in awe of his former boss.
Taylor, now the University of Regina Cougars’ women’s basketball coach, was an assistant when Stapleton held the job in the late 1990s and early 2000s. To him, it was Stapleton’s “pure energy” that helped bring the program back after a couple of down years.
That work ethic and her “relentless recruiting” would lead to steady improvement in the years after her first season in 1993-94, culminating with a national championship for the Cougars in 2001.
It’s that kind of drive that is still required in Stapleton’s current roles. First, as mother to nineyear-old Moira and seven-year-old Patrick. And second, as the director of sport and recreation services at the University of Western Ontario in what must be one of the largest jobs in Canadian university sports.
Stapleton oversees 1,100 varsity student athletes and 1,000 competitive club athletes on 46 Mustangs teams, plus 15,000 intramural competitors and the facilities in which they all play. (For comparison’s sake, in her last gig as the University of Calgary athletic director, Stapleton oversaw 15 teams.)
“The sheer volume, the scope of this job is bigger than anything I’ve done before,” Stapleton says of the post, which she started in July after two years in Calgary. “But everything I’d done left me well-prepared for it.”
After a standout career as a basketball player at Laurentian University (including two national titles), Stapleton made her way into the coaching ranks and took the Regina job in 1993. The program had been one of the best in the West in years prior, but had stumbled and finished with a 2-10 conference record, good for last in the four-team Great Plains Athletic Conference, in 1992-93.
It was a slow build from there as Stapleton gradually improved the Cougars’ record while bringing in players like Gottselig, Bree Burgess, Cymone Bouchard and Corrin Wersta.
Stapleton credits the work of former kinesiology dean Ralph Nilson and former athletic director Dick White for setting up a system where coaches could focus on “going after excellence.”
“It allowed me to head out and get these great players that Saskatchewan was producing,” she says.
Since leaving the U of R in 2002 to join Basketball Canada as the head of the National Elite Development Academy, Stapleton’s legacy has endured. The Cougars have been a contender most every year (finishing under .500 only once), while appearing in four national championship games.
“I live in absolute fear of letting the program slide again because I saw the energy it took to get it back,” says Taylor.
After Stapleton’s daughter came along in 2008, the longtime coach realized she didn’t want to be on the road as much as she had been, so she started looking toward the administrative side of sport.
Following seven years with Basketball Canada, Stapleton joined the University of Waterloo for six years as its associate athletic director before moving on to Calgary.
That work has now brought her home. Western’s London, Ont., campus is less than an hour from the farm she grew up on in Goderich, where her parents still live. Her husband grew up in Niagara.
And she still gets to foster her “great passion for university sport in Canada.”
While she stays out of the way of coaches (she’s more focused on setting up systems — including business operations and fundraising — in which teams can succeed), don’t think Stapleton will be away from the sidelines forever.
“When people ask me what I’d want to do in retirement,” she says, “I tell them: ‘I’d want to coach again.’ ”