Did the Blarney Stone help make hoop magic?
Blues basketball program thriving thanks in large part to coaching style of Alex Devlin
The chances are pretty strong that over the course of the Port Moody Blues Grade 9 boys basketball season, the team’s head coach never once referenced the fact that he was a member of Canada’s men’s national team at the 1976 Olympic Games.
Ditto for the fact that he was offered an invitation in the 1970s to rookie camp for the Portland Trail Blazers.
Forty years into a coaching life that has touched so many on so many different levels, Alex Devlin will admit to having kissed the famed Blarney Stone twice, yet his lyrical gift for basketball gab is never self-serving, only self-effacing.
“You have to climb up all of these flights, lay on your back, and then kiss it,” laughed the 65-year-old who began his coaching career at the helm of the Simon Fraser Clan junior varsity in the late 1970s for a team that included none other than Terry Fox.
“I should have just kissed it once. Two times might have been a bit of overkill.”
To which we can only say nonsense, because at Port Moody, a school not known for regularly producing topflight senior boys teams, it has been through the Yoda-like wit and wisdom of Devlin that exciting young talent has begun to create a culture which has helped its Grade 11-12 team to compete with traditional Fraser Valley North powers like Terry Fox and Heritage Woods.
“He showed me how to demand maximum effort and how to measure success, but at the same time still show the players that you care for them,” said current senior head coach Troy Cunningham.
“I have found that to be a great general philosophy to raise my own son. And I am sure the reason for my son’s love of basketball is a direct result of the fact that I was mentored by Alex.”
Added St. George’s head coach Bill Disbrow, who was a couple of years Devlin’s elder when both played at Burnaby Central in the mid-to-late 1960s: “He sees through the complexities and understands the game as well as anyone I’ve ever spoken to. But more than anything, it’s been his attitude to life and how he treats other people.”
After all his years of coaching, Devlin has distilled his beliefs into efficient axioms that are quick and to the point.
“When a player beats his man on the perimeter, the decisions he makes going to the basket will define him,” said Devlin of one example.
“Some have nothing on their mind but scoring. They don’t have the bigger picture.”
One player that Devlin feels shows great promise in that area is Blues’ Grade 11 point guard Kaito Cunningham, the coach’s son. Both he and star Grade 10 wing Simon Wei have been among the bright lights on a team trying to make the provincials for the first time since 2008.
As a testament to the continuity at the school, that team was coached by none other than veteran bench boss Bob Wright, who this season coached the Blues’ JV team.
And thus in a full-circle kind of way, it’s getting easier and easier to talk about a Port Moody basketball tradition.
Wright is the son of the late Ken Wright, the pioneering coach who won five titles with Duke of Connaught and Vancouver College.
In 1977, one year removed from playing on the national team and while he was coaching the SFU JV’s, Devlin was tabbed by Ken Wright for his first-ever high school coaching gig at New Westminster Secondary.
Along the way, Devlin got a chance to coach both his daughter Kelly, now a basketball coach at Heritage Woods, and his son Jeremy, a budding novelist, through their high school careers at Port Moody.
“That was the most meaningful and rich experience I have had, and I wouldn’t have traded that for my playing career or anything,” Devlin said, “and I know Troy is going through that right now with his own son.”
And that’s no blarney.