COACH RETIRES AFTER 36 YEARS
Jill Konkin’s high-school career ends
Jill Konkin is a people person. She’s an extrovert.
She would love to say goodbye to all of her students and colleagues in person. She’d zap Zoom away in a flash.
Her last days before retiring as a high-school teacher and longtime high-school sports coach have been, well, different, during a COVID-19 pandemic — but she certainly isn’t feeling sorry for herself.
“I kind of go with the flow," says Konkin, who is wrapping up her career by counting down the days at Saskatoon’s Centennial Collegiate.
“I don’t think it’s been any harder for me than anybody else. Actually I think the superheroes are the teachers at home (teaching an online educational model) with the young kids, and who are juggling that. My kids are a little bit older and can be on their own a bit.”
Konkin, 59, grew up in Saskatoon and attended Nutana Collegiate before studying at the University of Saskatchewan. She began teaching in 1984 in Kerrobert, jumping right into coaching. From there, she returned to Saskatoon, where she’s had stints at Evan Hardy, Walter Murray, Aden Bowman, Mount Royal and Centennial.
Over a span of 36 years, she has coached a combined 63 sport seasons in basketball, soccer, cross-country, and track and field. But don’t tell her that.
It’s not that Konkin lost count of her years as a high-school sports coach. She’s never ever even tried to count them up.
“I’m not a detail person,” she readily admits.
No matter how you look at, she has worked and coached a lot.
That’s a lot of seasons, a lot of sports and a lot of athletes over those years for Konkin, one of this year’s Saskatoon Secondary Schools Athletic Directorate Merit Award and Saskatchewan High Schools Athletic Association Service Award recipients. Due to the social-gathering restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, the annual coaches’ awards luncheon has been postponed until the spring of 2021.
“Certainly I’m a people person, so not having the opportunity to spend time with the students, and obviously those track kids and so many other sports, kids who have worked towards their senior year, those are the kids I feel most badly for, even the basketball kids who didn’t get to finish their season, and the grads,” Konkin says.
“Those are big days for them and it’s not as easy for them to understand what’s going on, maybe, as it is for the older farts.
“With my Zoom (meetings) here, I wish I could have all of the kids on here all of the time and let them know how much I would have liked to have gotten to know them better. My teaching is all about relationships. Really, that’s the crux of it all and I really didn’t have the chance to do that with this last group.”
Although she began her city coaching career at Hardy, it was at Mount Royal that Konkin took over the helm from Irene Wallace and spent nine years coaching senior girls basketball and cross-country.
Even some soccer, too.
“I knew nothing about soccer when I started but they were going to pull the team and I thought ‘they can’t pull the team,’” she recalls, adding that she learned the lexicon from parents and learned the game from mentors like Ross Wilson, as well as through coaching clinics.
There were other mentors before that, back during her own high school days.
“I went to Nutana and had very strong mentors: Ed Lepp, Bob Bevan, Maureen Howey. They were my strongest influencers for becoming a phys. ed. teacher and, for sure, a coach, and then getting myself involved with university track with people like Lyle Sanderson.”
She also came from a sporting background. Her dad played Hilltops football and was big into sports.
“I did track and field when I was in high school, and I did fairly well, but I never went into university track and field right away. It was people like Lyle who were hounding me to join, and I think that’s one of the things I took into coaching, and that’s lots of kids want to join activities but sometimes they really need to be persuaded and gain the confidence to do it. Everybody does it at their own rate. I had amazing mentors.”
OH, THE MEMORIES
Konkin leaves behind her own legacy but motors on with a busload of memories.
“My fondest memories, without question, are the road trips,” she says. “I think I’m a kid at heart. Those are some of the events that the kids remember … I used to take the kids to P.A., when we had soccer, and I used to take them to the cabin. We’d have 22 kids and they’d all be playing games. It’s outside of sport but it’s part of sport: it’s learning citizenship, learning respect and teammates, and learning about diversity.
"Sport was kind of not an end in itself; it was kind of a means to an end for me. I love sport, and I love competition, but the relationships and the other kind of learning that went on were my focus.”
In her later years, Konkin moved out of the gym and branched out into a role of career development.
“I really liked that. The last few years, when I haven’t been involved with maybe doing head coaching, I just found that I took those skills and transferred them into other areas of life.”
Looking back, the biggest rewards as a high-school coach are “just the friendships," she says.
Without question, she admits, she will miss people — “just the daily interaction.”
"I’m an extrovert so I get my energy from students, just the energy and camaraderie with coaches. With kids, it’s so nice seeing them gaining some self-efficacy through sport, reaching their potential and reaching their goals that are unexpected.
“I guess that was always my biggest thing. I coached a lot of high-level athletes, but I think my personality was more suited for kids who were maybe the underdogs, or the unexpected players.
“It’s been a little bit of a weird ending to everybody’s school year. I guess we can feel good in the fact that we’re not alone in having a weird ending — everybody’s in the same situation.”