The Dalhousie Tigers - Dalhousie University

Who has committed 44 years to coaching at Dalhousie, coached 91 conference championship teams including 28 athletes who have gone on to national team competitions, has had five teams win CIAU/CIS medals and has coached national teams in three different sports? There can be only one answer: Al Yarr.

The breadth of sports which Al has coached is as expansive as his list of successes. During his early years at Dalhousie, Al coached men's basketball, track and field, cross country, golf, tennis and was an assistant coach with the football team.

Al coached the men’s basketball team from 1963-1979, making it a point of pride to recruit exclusively in Canada, while the other top teams were predominantly American. The roster of Canadian athletes certainly didn’t slow Dalhousie’s success. From 1967-72, Dalhousie had one of the best teams in the league with league records of 10-2 twice and 9-3 twice. Two ties for league honours were among the highlight. During the same period, Al also coached the Nova Scotia basketball team at the first Canada Winter Games in Quebec City in 1967 where the team captured a bronze medal. In 1968-69 Al was 

assistant coach of the Canadian men's national basketball team. Al also had what he has always referred to as ‘the privilege’ of coaching John Cassidy, who went on to spend ten years on Canada’s national team and played in the 1976 Montreal Olympics.

Although Al started at Dalhousie with a significant focus on basketball, his great passion in his later coaching years has been in the sports of cross country and track and field. In 1967 Dalhousie won its first AUAA track and field conference championship since the sport’s inception in the league in 1911. Al quickly followed his success on the track with success on the cross country trails with Dalhousie winning its first ever AUAA cross country conference championship in 1972. From these modest beginnings, Al has developed very successful track and field and cross country programs at Dalhousie. The majority of the 91 conference championships his teams have won were in these two sports.

An exceptional level of optimism is what Al Yarr brings to sport. He believes in people living their dreams, in the pursuing excellence at the highest levels and in enjoying the process through the laughter of one’s teammates and the experience of being a varsity athlete at Dalhousie. He inspires teams by believing in them and that they can accomplish what any statistician would claim impossible. It is a tribute to the strength of those beliefs that they do, in fact, often overpower statistical odds; Al propels his athletes and teams to accomplish the seemingly impossible.

The credit for his success, according to Al, is often left to his athletes. His mantra, "You don't become a great coach without having great athletes,” speaks both to his faith in the athletes with whom he works and to what he enjoys most about coaching. Despite the unprecedented number of conference wins he has recorded, Al’s undiminished enthusiasm for coaching is powered by his enjoyment of working with the people attracted to the sports he coaches. He still gets excited about new runners coming to Dalhousie, new training techniques and is elated when athletes achieve personal bests.

Al is a student of the game, whatever that game may be. Whether it is basketball, golf, running, or life, he is always searching for and integrating new ideas into training programs. After forty-four years Al is still learning, perhaps more voraciously than ever. He reads constantly, learning from sports greats in the process. Over his career he has sought out and learned from the world’s best coaches including such John Wooden and Jack Donahue in basketball and Peter Coe in track and field, among hundreds of others. After over fifty years of learning from the best, Al’s wealth of knowledge reaches into every aspect of coaching.

Ninety one conference championships is a legacy in its own right, but what is not reflected in this number is the influence Al has had on Dalhousie’s student-athletes, as people. He has been a coach, a teacher, a mentor and a friend to hundreds of student-athletes, spanning five decades. Al's contribution to sport at Dalhousie has been immense. It would be difficult to find anyone in the history of coaching that has given so much of himself to Dalhousie athletics. He is, without question, a Dalhousie coaching icon.