When the Guelph Gryphons play their final game of the OUA men’s soccer season, it’ll be the final game for Keith Mason as head coach of the squad.
While Mason, 63, is retiring from his coaching position with the Gryphons, he’s not stepping away from his role with the Guelph United Football Club he helped found.
“I'm staying involved with United, 100 per cent,” he said. “I'm committed to that. I love that. I've loved my time at the university. I've loved it. It's been an amazing 36-year ride, but it's a long way between (seasons) and a short season. I've still got the passion. I challenge anyone to come watch me coach and they'll see I've lost none of that. But the nine, 10 months in between is long and tough.
“And there's been a lot of changes in everything we do nowadays and I just find that a little bit challenging, that in between time. And you know with Guelph United, it allows me just to focus on the soccer side. Who knows, I never say never. I enjoy being on the field with the guys. So if the university (and) I could just do for two or three months, it would be great. I would love it. But the year-round thing on that side of things is a bit tough right now.”
Mason has been involved with soccer in Guelph since shortly after arriving in the country in 1981. He was “born and bred” in West Bromwich and is a West Brom supporter, something that’s a tradition in his family.
But a chance trip to a mall in Guelph back before the specialty sports channels existed led to the start of his coaching in the sport.
“I was a deprived soccer fanatic and I was walking in Willow West Mall back in the days when it used to be a mall with Zellers and all those things,” he recalled. “And Guelph Soccer (then known as the Guelph Youth Soccer Club) was doing their registration. They used to do it in the mall in the middle and just sign up players before the days of online. And they had TVs around the tables with soccer on.
“And I happened to be walking through and saw this soccer game on TV. I'm going, 'Oh, what's this?' And I started watching it and a Scotch guy comes to me named Ken McLennan who used to be a rep coach back in those days. And Kenny goes, 'You like football?' "Oh, I love football. You know, like, it's me. That's who I am.’”
The conversation continued and Mason, 21 at the time, was persuaded to coach one of the club’s house league teams. And as a bit of a crash course in coaching, he went out to winter practices with McLennan’s rep team.
“And as they say, that became the beginning of what's been a great career,” Mason said. “So I went out in that winter, trained with that rep team. It was a girls' team. I had a ball. I decided to take a house league team in 1982 and I remember going to Guelph Soccer and they gave me a bag of balls with, I think, three balls in it, three or four balls in it, about six cones and a sheet with a bunch of names on it said 'There's your team. Start coaching.' And I'm going, ‘Okay, I've never coached. I play.’
“I know at the time I was playing for the Guelph Oaks and we had a pretty good team.
"When I think back, that first training session I'm going. 'What do I do?' So I went with what we were doing. How relevant it was to 10-year-old house league girls, it was probably zero, but that's what I went with because that's what I knew. And it was great. I had a great year and we won the house league trophy that year. And I had a great player called Helen Stoumbos. She was just a little kid and was on that house league team. What a start and introduction that was.”
Stoumbos would eventually go on to play for the Canadian National Women's Team.
And it didn’t sour him on coaching.
“It turned me off of playing,” Mason said. “It's really weird. I enjoyed coaching that much that I didn't want to put the time into playing. I love playing the actual game, but the training, I wasn't big on all that which is ironic as a coach because I know the importance of training. But back then, the training was a lot different to nowadays. It was a lot of big runs. You know, you go for running and running and running and push-ups and sit-ups. We didn't do a lot of technical work. We did a lot of running. And at the end of the practice, the coach would get the ball out and say 'Play' and, you know, that was pretty well it."
Mason started coaching at the University of Guelph was also with the women’s squad where he was the coach from the 1989 to 1996 seasons.
“Gunther Zemanek, who was the women's coach at the university, was retiring in 1989,” Mason said. “Gunther asked me if I'd be interested in taking over the university. Back then, times were a lot different. They didn't advertise for a position. They didn't really do interviews. Gunther recommended me. I met with Shirley Peterson, who sat down with me, told the expectations and the little I would get for doing it. And then I just took over from Gunther when he left. And the rest is history. Thirty-six seasons later, I'm ready to just finish my last one at the university.”
He became head coach of the Gryphons men’s team in 2000 after serving as an assistant under head coach Colin Kelly from the 1997 season on.
As far as memorable moments with university soccer squads, the 2016 season when the men won the OUA championship stands at the top of the on-field memories.
“I think we had the best team I've ever coached,” he said. “That year we could have and probably should have won the national championship. For me, that was the closest we've ever been as we ended up with the bronze at nationals and Ontario champions. It was a heck of a roller coaster, but with Jace Kotsopoulos, Tommy Skublak, Alexander Zis, Justin Springer, Ethan Danieli, we had some talent on that team. And it was a pleasure to coach that year.”
As far as off the field, the arrival of Tom Kendall as the university’s athletic director stands out to Mason.
“He challenged us coaches to do better and he asked me what we needed to turn the program into what was mediocre into a championship-challenging team,” Mason said. “I told him the fields were very poor. We had those terrible old grass fields. We played on the stadium grass the day after football on a rainy day and it was just mud. And it wasn't an environment for excellence at all. And he said, 'Okay, now I know. My job is to get that for you.' And now we have the Gryphon Soccer Complex. And for me, Tom Kendall will always have my utmost respect because not only did he challenge me as a coach and a person, but he also followed up on his side. And he made my position from an honorarium into now I'm paid to do a job.”
Away from the university, Mason helped found Guelph United in 2020.
“I'm over the moon with United,” he said. “I've watched the growth of our club. I've watched the reputation we've built within Ontario and nationally. People recognize Guelph United players as good players from the top level down. I was in Halifax last summer and went to the (Canadian Premier League) club for a few days. I was talking to the GM and their coaches and they're talking to me about my players that they really like and they're keeping an eye on. And the fact that Halifax Wanderers of the CPL are watching my players in little old Guelph is fantastic. I couldn't be any prouder of the club than I am.”
Founding United fulfilled a goal of bringing high-level soccer to the city, something he tried to do shortly before the turn of the century when he attempted to get Guelph into the semi-pro A-League.
“It never got off the ground,” he said. “We went quite a long way down the road on that one, but at the end of the day we just didn't have the financial backing behind it for us to push it over the line. They were very interested in coming to Guelph. We just didn't have enough capital to make it work so we sort of pulled out. But yeah, that's always been a goal of mine. And to have this now 30 years later is something I'm really happy about.”
