How Catholic Central coach Toni Magni learned from legends to become one himself
Toni Magni was a recent graduate of the University of Detroit in the early 1970s and heard Grosse Pointe St. Paul was looking to hire a cross-country coach.
Magni had never coached before so he asked the advice of Lou Miramonti, who had coached him at Detroit St. Anthony.
“I asked him if I should apply,” Magni recalled. “He said: ‘Sure. The worst thing they could do is give you the job.’ ’’
Well, Ed Lauer, the legendary St. Paul athletic director and basketball coach, did indeed do the worst thing and hired Magni.
It turned out to be one of the best things ever for Novi Detroit Catholic Central as well as track and cross-country in the state
A native of Ceprano, Italy, Magni is celebrating his 55th year as a cross country coach and his 50th at Catholic Central and was honored with the Mary Cicerone Lifetime Achievement award at the annual Free Press’ Sports Awards event.
A member of the Detroit Catholic League Hall of Fame, Magni was basically raised by Hall of Famers at St. Anthony.
He was coached there in a variety of sports by Miramonti and Dave Soules, and Diane Laffey was his Spanish teacher.
Laffey became a Hall of Famer for her coaching days at Harper Woods/Warren Regina, winning seven state titles in softball and multiple Catholic League titles coaching basketball.
“I remember getting a paper back from Diane,” Magni said. “At the top she gave me an ‘F’ and she wrote: ‘It’s not Italian.’“
Miramonti became a hugely successful coach at Royal Oak Shrine, and Soules stuck around and coached basketball at St. Anthony, which later joined forces with other neighborhood schools to create Detroit East Catholic.
Soules won 604 games, including seven state championships at East Catholic.
Throw in his time working under Ed Lauer, who the Catholic League honors with its most prestigious award, the Ed Lauer Person of the Year award, and Magni had no choice but to be a tremendous coach.
One day, St. Paul was supposed to have a race at Redeemer and Magni asked Lauer when the bus driver was going to arrive. Lauer opened his desk drawer, pulled out the keys and tossed them to Magni.
“’Here you go,’ he told me, “Magni said. “I had never driven a bus in my life. I still drive the bus.”
In 2003, Magni was named the 2003 Ed Lauer Person of the Year.
In 1973, Magni was hired as an assistant coach and a teacher at Catholic Central and took over the cross-country and track teams a couple of years later.
Magni, 77, came to the United States in
1957 without speaking a word of English.
It took him only a couple of months to learn the language attending night school a few night a week.
“The people next door had a television,” he said. “We didn’t have money to buy a TV. But we’d watch it next door and picked it up from there. ‘The Lone Ranger’ was my favorite program.”
Magni’s cross-country teams have won six state championship and 30 Catholic League titles. Each year the Shamrocks are perennial contenders.
CC may not have an individual title contender, but Magni’s teams feature excellent runners throughout the entire team.
Some of the overall team success can traced to the preseason camp the CC runners attended each year at the Pinery Provincial Park in Grand Bend, Ontario.
“I slept in sleeping bags in tents for two weeks every summer,” Magni said, laughing at the absurdity of how it now sounds. “We’re not doing that anymore.”
Magni’s teams have combined to win enough trophies for Magni to open a trophy store. But Magni doesn’t coach to win trophies.
The best part of coaching has nothing to do with trophies or titles. It’s about the invitations him and Linda receive.
“My wife and I have been to more weddings throughout my career here,” he said. “We’ve been to weddings as far away as California. It’s the idea that they still respect my wife and I to the point that they invite us to their wedding.”
Magni is thrilled when former athletes of his go into coaching and tell him how they remember some of the workouts he put them through and they are now using those workouts with their team.
They also steal some of his lines that he used on them, back in the day. The most famous is: “If you’re on time, you’re late.”
“I like the idea the boys, after the leave, say they learned something from me and they’ve passed it on to other people,” Magni said. “I tell them I’m flattered that they use that, just don’t beat me.”
Magni gave up teaching health and physical education a few years ago when COVID-19 struck, but there was no way he was going to give up coaching.
As the years have gone on, the questions about how long Magni will continue to coach have increased. He isn’t exactly sure how to answer them.
“A lot of parents of freshman ask if I’m going to stay four more years to see their kids graduate,” he said. “I tell them, I’ll see them graduate, but I don’t know if I’ll still be their coach.
“It’s got to end one of these days, I would think. It can’t go on forever.”
The problem — if it’s really a problem — is that the runners on his teams become part of his family.
“Being Italian, family is very important to me,” he said. “Those kids, I’ve been to baptisms. We’ve had six weddings this year.
"Linda and I don’t have any children, but when people ask, I tell them I have 1,000 sons.”
Mick McCabe is a former longtime columnist for the Detroit Free Press. Contact him at mick.mccabe11@gmail.com . Follow him on Twitter @mickmccabe1. Order his book, “Mick McCabe’s Golden Yearbook: 50 Great Years of Michigan’s Best High School Players, Teams & Memories,” right now at McCabe.PictorialBook.com.