Forsyth leaves legacy on, off the court

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This article was published 16/03/2022 (1482 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BOISSEVAIN — After 27 seasons spent on the bench mentoring the Boissevain Broncos basketball community, Keith Forsyth quietly retired from the sport with 1,224 games coached to his name.

Following a 52-50 playoff loss against the Virden Bears Varsity AA girls team on March 3, Forsyth’s final game had concluded after more than two decades of coaching both the varsity and junior varsity Broncos girls teams at the K-12 Boissevain School.

While there were no big celebrations for Forsyth, 55, the now-retired basketball coach said — after thanking his squad — the adrenalin rush from the sport stayed with him from the time he started coaching at 28.

“Whether you win or lose, when the buzzer goes at the end of the game, there is a big flush of emotion,” Forsyth said.

“The adrenalin was there. This is why I loved it.”

Forsyth first came to Boissevain School in 1995 after working as a principal in Minto shortly before. Teaching pre-calculus and math courses at the school, Forsyth told the Sun he was asked by the principal at the time to start coaching basketball — a sport he never originally played.

He grew up playing hockey and baseball and only participated in a single exhibition game at Brandon University. Growing up in Hartney, Forsyth knew the Boissevain community well and said Al Stewart, who helped run the phys-ed program at the school, recruited him to learn the game of basketball to work with the girls teams.

“I think I’m getting phased into this,” Forsyth said as he laughed, remembering what he said to Stewart.

After watching the girls advance to provincials, Forsyth said he realized the program meant a lot to the school. By the 2002-03 season, he took over the head coaching roles for both the varsity and junior varsity level girls teams following Stewart’s retirement.

“I walked into a program here that was already well established, and so when I took over, it was a matter of taking over,” Forsyth said.

“We managed to get over the hump in 2003.”

That hump resulted in Forsyth coaching the AA Varsity Broncos girls team to a championship in that 2002-03 season. Forsyth’s squad would repeat the same feat in the 2003-04 season before the streak ended in 2005, when they lost in the AA Varsity girls final. Forsyth said he took his teams to provincials 20 years in a row.

“Getting to provincials became the point for the girls. [They’d say] ‘when is provincials?’ Not, ‘can we qualify?’” Forsyth said.

Forsyth said he was proud to keep a strong program in place for many years. He told the Sun he coached a varsity team that won at provincials seven times, a junior varsity team that won provincials three times, lost in provincial finals between the two groups five times, and coached in 15 provincial finals.

He said he never had a shortage of players interested in playing for the teams in Boissevain. Forsyth attributed running a basketball camp for 16 years in the summer for kids between grades 1 to 8 as a way to generate greater interest in the sport.

During his time coaching, Forsyth said a highlight of his was making connections with coaches in North Dakota for competitive matches just across the border. For a period of five to six years, Forsyth brought the team to border towns like Dunseith, St. John, Bottineau and Westhope, N.D.

“Those little towns, they treat basketball like we treat hockey. If we were within 20 [points in a game], we were doing well,” Forsyth said.

“That’s a whole different game.”

He recalled the parents’ frustration after once facing Belcourt, a town with a varsity team similar in population to Boissevain.

“At the half, it was 59-8 for them, and we lost 113-32 with their bench players on in the second half,” Forsyth said as he laughed.

“This is why we don’t play their varsity teams.”

Forsyth said he would schedule those games against American teams a year in advance, as the Broncos looked for tougher competition. Based on zones and divisions, he said the team had to travel a fair distance at times for good matches in Manitoba, often against teams in Brandon, Winnipeg, and their biggest rivals, the Souris Sabres.

Forsyth had a chance to celebrate both the junior varsity and varsity Broncos girls squads winning in the 2018-19 season, a first under his tenure as coach. In 2019-20, the varsity girls team was ranked No. 1 going into provincials before the sports community was uprooted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The sad part is, we’d be really good right now if it weren’t for the pandemic,” Forsyth said.

“We had a very good shot at winning in 2020.”

While looking back on all of his games coached, Forsyth realized his 1,224th and final game shares a special connection to his family out of pure coincidence.

“The ironic thing is, I’ve had two daughters that have played, and both did quite well,” Forsyth said.

“My oldest daughter Natalie’s number was 12 and my youngest daughter Jenny’s number was 24. That’s the coolest thing about that number. That’s odd.”

Forsyth retired from teaching math in June 2021 but agreed to stay on to coach basketball for one more season. He said what he grew to learn and love the most about coaching was getting his mind to think three to four minutes ahead of the action on the court.

For example: “Sally has been out there for five minutes, she must be getting tired, who can I put on, and now who’s got foul trouble,” Forsyth said. “I can’t put her on, and now we have to change our defence.

“As a coach, you can directly affect the outcome of a game. If you do it well enough, you can control what the other team does.”

Corey Billaney, a longtime friend and teacher at Boissevain School, has worked with Forsyth since the 2005-06 school year as the school’s phys-ed teacher. Growing up and playing baseball together, Billaney said Forsyth always kept his heart in sports and was driven to bring success to the Boissevain sports program.

“When you put in the time, you’ll get the results, and that’s what he has done for our school and community,” Billaney said.

“He gets the best out of every athlete he coaches and in doing that, the program flourished.”

After accepting retirement from teaching, Forsyth has become a regular contributor to The Hockey Writers, covering the Winnipeg Jets as a sportswriter since October 2021. He said the years of coaching worked in his favour as he had previously written sports columns for The Recorder from 2014 to the start of the pandemic.

This spring, Billaney has recruited Forsyth to stay on as a coach of the school’s baseball team, a coaching tandem the two friends have maintained for the last seven years. Forsyth said the opportunity to stay involved in baseball reminds him of the family-like atmosphere coaching basketball brought to his life.

“Hell, there were years when I was a doctor, a counsellor, a teacher and their coach and in some cases a dad,” Forsyth said.

“Those are some of the things that you take back and without anybody else seeing, you take gratification from that. I helped that kid.”

Billaney said as he gets older, he shares a similar philosophy to Forsyth in keeping a sports program running that is not entirely based on the number of banners or championships hung in the rafters.

“The results are in the good people he has turned out,” Billaney said.

“We don’t want kids to leave with championships. We want kids to leave [high school] as good people.”

» jbernacki@brandonsun.com

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