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Bryce back to coach women’s basketball at VIU

Tony Bryce, former coach of the Mariners men’s basketball team, returning to VIU and PacWest
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Vancouver Island University’s athletics department announced Tuesday that Tony Bryce will be the new head coach of the women’s basketball team. (NEWS BULLETIN file)

The VIU Mariners hired a basketball coach who is a familiar name and a past champion.

Vancouver Island University’s athletics department announced Tuesday that Tony Bryce will be the new head coach of the women’s basketball team.

Bryce coached VIU’s men’s basketball team for six seasons until 2012, leading that program to its first provincial championship in 15 years when it won PacWest gold in 2011. He’s missed coaching basketball, and was immediately interested after he heard about the coaching vacancy at VIU.

“My wife, right away, said, ‘So you’re applying, right?’ and my mind hadn’t even got there yet and then as we started to process it together, it was like, ‘Yeah, I need this back in my life’…” Bryce said. “Last time when I stepped down it was a brutally difficult decision, but at the time I had kind of burnt myself out and I needed to take a step back and reassess, but I’ve been struggling without it. It’s my passion and it’s what I think I’ve been put on this Earth to do, to guide and mentor and inspire youth.”

To do so in his hometown was an opportunity that doesn’t come along often, Bryce said, and speaking with Stephanie White, the university’s director of high-performance sports, recreation and physical literacy, “I got a good vibe from the direction that things were going and it just felt right.”

Bryce is a three-time PacWest Coach of the Year and also won CCAA Coach of the Year once while compiling an overall coaching record of 87-15. Coaching the women’s game, he said, will be different in some ways and no different in other ways; the women want to be challenged and treated the same as the men would. He’ll coach to his personnel, but has some ideas about the type of basketball he wants to see from the Mariners women.

“I want to play at a higher pace. I want to be exciting to watch and get up and down the floor, but I also want to be a very physical defensive team that has depth and can wear people out,” he said.

Bryce said he’s “ultra competitive” and wants to have a competitive team on the court next season, but said the reality is that it will take a few seasons to “get what I want in place and the type of people I want in place.”

Bryce replaces Bill McWhinnie, whose contract wasn’t renewed after 2016-17, and the new coach’s work has already started as the 2017-18 season starts sooner than later.

“The timing is not ideal, but Bill did a great job. I’m not stepping into a program that’s totally broken or anything, so I’m off to a good start there,” Bryce said. “Is it going to be tough to make major changes between now and September? Probably. Am I going to try to? Absolutely.”

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