CHARLOTTETOWN, P.E.I. - Winning never gets old, but sometimes it comes as a surprise.
Paul Turner recently that found out after the Charlottetown native won the 2018 Special Olympics Ontario and national male coach of the year awards within a week of each other.
“It’s a honour and I’m humbled to receive either award. I was just dumbfounded,” Turner said, adding he’d heard rumblings the Ontario honour might come his way but the national nod proved a shocker. “(That) came right out of the blue.”
Turner coaches floor hockey and has for nearly 40 years, with the occasional foray as a softball and soccer coach. He’s a double silver medalist, too, guiding his floor hockey squad to second-place finishes at the 2009 and 2017 World Games. The squad has also won three straight nationals, 2008, 2012 and 2016, which go every four years.
His charges run in ages from 17 to 49 and practice regularly. Some of Turner’s players have been teammates for 20 years. All are training for the 2019 Ontario Provincial Games in May. If the team wins there, it qualifies for the nationals in 2020.
The squad scrimmages with all comers as well, including able-bodied and university men’s teams, and the Guelph police force. Without a league, it’s a make-do proposition and while Special Olympics teams exist in Peterborough and Ottawa and Turner would love to face them, he said transportation costs are too high to make meeting feasible.
Now 67, Turner has lived in the Guelph, Ont., area (now residing in Fergus just a few minutes away), since the early 1970s. He grew up playing hockey in Charlottetown, but moved to Ontario with brothers Robert and Peter when their mother remarried.
Once there, Turner started coaching, driven by a childhood memory of seeing a handicapped man being laughed at by group of boys outside what was then the YMCA in Charlottetown.
And after nearly four decades and thousands of hours, Turner said the same things keep him fresh and focused now as then.
“The athletes for one,” said Turner, whose eldest son Shawn is also involved in Special Olympics. “If you have a bad day at the office, you come to the gym and you don’t have a bad day anymore.”
