Victoria’s MacDonald named head coach of the Penguins’ AHL team

Kirk MacDonald, son of University of Victoria athletic director Wayne MacDonald, had access to some of the brightest minds in sports growing up. A special mentor was former UVic Vikes football coach Bruce Wilson, who captained Canada in the 1986 World Cup.

Although he was a field hockey and lacrosse player, Kirk MacDonald absorbed all the lessons he could from any sport, and it put the former Victoria Salsa (now Grizzlies) BCHL junior in good stead when he was named the new head coach of the premier branch of NHL Pittsburgh. the Wilkes-Barre Penguins of the American Hockey League. It’s the latest step in a coaching career that included eight seasons in the pro ECHL with the Reading Royals and the last two in the junior USHL with the Dubuque Fighting Saints, a league that MacDonald says is now comparable to major-junior Canadian Hockey. Competition.

“My father spent his life in sports and taught me that it all starts with how you treat people,” MacDonald said.

“If you treat people the right way, it makes people want to work hard.”

That has led to another guiding philosophy: “I don’t have time for guys who don’t try their best,” added MacDonald, who cited his former Victoria lacrosse coaches Pete Rushton and Jim Gow as key early influences.

If you are a survivor of testicular cancer, having just graduated from Salsa, it gives you some perspective on fighting and perseverance.

MacDonald, a graduate of the Racquet Club of Victoria and a key member of the 2001 BCHL Champion Salsa team before joining NCAA Div. 1 at RPI and 272 games in the AHL, certainly did his share of work at Reading of the ECHL as an assistant coach, head coach and director of hockey operations before guiding Dubuque to the best record in the USHL East Division at 41 last season -year age. -13-8.

It’s the kind of path that Victoria’s Spencer Carbery has followed, the former ECHL and AHL mentor who is now head coach of the NHL’s Washington Capitals, and a former teammate of MacDonald’s with the VIJHL’s Peninsula Panthers.

“Spencer was great to ask for advice,” said MacDonald, 40.

That, of course, leads to the inevitable conversation about the possible possibility of a third Island-bred coach in the NHL joining Carbery and Campbell River’s Rod Brind’Amour of the Carolina Hurricanes.

A person can only do the job immediately in front of him, not some mythical future role, MacDonald said: “My job is to develop players for Pittsburgh that fit what they do, and to win games in Wilkes-Barre .”

Do that and the rest will take care of itself.