Daily Bulletin

UW coach heads Olympic team

Warrior indoor track and field head coach Brent McFarlane, left, will be traveling to the Sydney Olympics in September as Canada's head track and field coach with a team of 45 athletes and 15 support staff.

Colleague Sharon Creelman, Warrior field hockey coach, says McFarlane's high-profile appointment is "a big plus" for the department and for the university. "He's quite a remarkable man; he gets a lot done," she adds.

"A lot" is a bit of an understatement, according to a story about McFarlane on the UW athletics Web site:

"He is a level 4 NCCP coach in Canada for sprints and hurdles, and level 3 coach in middle and long distance. His international coaching experience includes stints as Olympic hurdle coach for the 1980 Olympic Games (Moscow), 1984 (Los Angeles), 1988 (Seoul, Korea), 1978 and 1986 Commonwealth Games and in 1994 head coach for the Canadian World Junior Team in Portugal. He has coached 38 athletes on Canadian National Teams and 35 National Champions.

"Brent has studied with coaches in Japan, Italy, England, Scotland, Finland, New Zealand, Sweden, and the USA. He has conducted over 450 clinics around the world and is the author of over 400 articles and 4 books on hurdling. Brent graduated from the University of Waterloo in 1973 with an Honors degree in Kinesiology. Brent was a member of the Varsity Track & Field Teams at Waterloo that won the first two OUAA championships in 1969 and 1970, then held outdoors. He has coached in the Kitchener-Waterloo TC for the past 27 years and is a teacher of Phys-Ed in Wellington County.

"Brent has developed a reputation as a team-oriented coach who strives for individual excellence with all the athletes he coaches. As Athena X-Country head coach in 1989, the team moved from unranked in Ontario to a 3rd at the OWIAA's and a bronze medal at the CIAU's. In his 8 years at UW, Track & Field athletes have achieved over 1100 personal bests and broken 26 varsity records. Twelve or more athletes have qualified for the Track & Field CIAU's each year. In 1996 he led the unranked Athena cross country team to the OWIAA and CIAU titles and was named OWIAA and CIAU Coach of the Year. In 1997 the Athena Track & Field team was 4th at OWIAA's and 3rd at CIAU's and he was named OWIAA Coach of the Year. In 1990 and again in 1997 Brent was honored and named UW's Coach of the Year. In 1999 Brent was again named the OUA Women's Coach of the Year for Track & Field."

Also happening today Licensing Intellectual Property 101, one of a series of lunch hour forums sponsored by the technology transfer and licensing office, is scheduled for noon in Needles Hall room 3001. UW researchers and students are welcome to the session, designed to illuminate intellectual property issues. An LT3 idea workshop will be held from 12:15 to 1:30 p.m. in LIB room 407 to discuss the article, "A Computer-based Harvard Red Book: General Education in the Digital Age," by Richard A. Lanham.

The honours haven't gone to his head, either, says UW track and field throws coach Tim Mussar, who considers McFarlane "one of the top four gurus of sprints and hurdles in the world. Working with Brent, you wouldn't think he's an Olympic head coach. He still has both feet firmly attached to the ground." Rather than pursue a career coaching high-profile athletes as many top-level coaches do, "Brent's style is to work with the younger kids and develop them into athletes. The kids really feed off that."

In his spare time this summer, McFarlane managed to land a major sponsorship for the cash-strapped Canadian Olympic track and field team.

A Canadian Press story on June 28 reported that, "Mark McIlvane, a senior vice-president of the telecommunications company Clarent Communications, has donated $10,000 US and offered another $5,000 to the Canadian team."

McFarlane was in Illinois in June helping McIlvane's teenage son with a training program for his upcoming hockey season when a conversation between McFarlane and the elder McIlvane led to the donation.

That ringing in your ears

"Telephone Services will soon be able to offer Distinctive Ringing by Directory Number (DRDN) on campus telephone sets," says Bruce Uttley of information systems and technology. "This new feature will support up to four additional distinctive rings based on the telephone set being called and the directory numbers programmed on the set.

"Telephone sets that are located close together can be programmed to a distinctive ring that people in the immediate area can recognize. "Multi-line sets can have each extension number on it programmed to one of the four distinctive rings.

For more information with samples of the four distinctive rings proposed, visit the telephone services website.

Staff positions this week

• Admissions and records assistant, registrar's office, grade USG 3/4.
• Project leader (applications technology), information systems and technology, grade USG 11/12.
• Serviceperson I, carpenter/cabinet maker, plant operations.
• Serviceperson I, sign maker, plant operations.

Barbara Hallett
bhallett@uwaterloo.ca

Editor of the Daily Bulletin: Chris Redmond
Information and Public Affairs, University of Waterloo
credmond@uwaterloo.ca | (519) 888-4567 ext. 3004
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