King joined the Ridgebacks athletic department in 2016 as the inaugural Ontario Tech badminton head coach.
King is well-known throughout the OUA having coached the Toronto Varsity Blues for 17 seasons. During those 17 seasons, Varsity Blues won two team championships (2003, 2013), earned one silver medal finish (2012) and won the bronze team medal on 10 occasions. He was named OUA coach of the year six times (1999, 2001, 2002, 2006, 2008 and 2013).
As a badminton player King had very limited experience – his elementary school was a small one room school where the only sports played were baseball, football and hockey on the playground and where a gymnasium was only something seen in books. As a young high school student (Brock DHS) King made only those teams which had no cuts (soccer, track and field and badminton) and was an enthusiastic member of all three. In later years he helped to start a badminton team program at Port Perry HS and thus began the coaching part of his badminton career.
After university studies, King started a small badminton club in Ajax at Harwood Special Vocational School where he coached that school’s team from 1974 to 1986 – the vocational school was part of LOSSA and as such, qualified for OFSAA competition every season from 1978 to 1986, something that no other vocational school has ever done. In 1986 King moved to Ajax HS and continued to coach that school team from 1986 to 2010 and continued the Harwood Club program as well. During those years. During those years, Ajax athletes won four OFSAA individual A titles (Jamie Gardner/Ross Smith – 1988 boy’s doubles, Tony Chan/Vikas Mohindra – 2001 boy’s doubles and Nathaniel Allard – 2003, 2004 boy’s singles) – and many other top-five finishes in the Ontario championship. And at the club level Harwood has produced many COBA champions, numerous Ontario champions and two Canadian champions (Heather van Patter – under 16 GD 1987, 1988, under 16 XD – 1988 and Nathaniel Allard – under 16 BD 2001). The usual memory of Harwood athletes forever has been athletes who respect their opponents, the tournament officials, their coaches and the sport itself and that has been the Harwood “brand” since its inception.
Within Ontario, King has coached COBA teams at the Ontario Winter games on three occasions, was COBA junior development chair from 1990 to 2001 and COBA president from 2002 – 2016, was selected in 1986 to represent Ontario as head coach for the two-month athlete/coach exchange with the high performance center in Jiangsu, China, is the only two-time recipient of the Keith Hollands Award given by Badminton Ontario for outstanding volunteer service to badminton in Ontario each season. King was also named Ontario Coach of the Year by Badminton Ontario on three occasions and was Ontario badminton team head coach at 1991 Canada Winter Games (Prince Edward Island).
On the development front, King is an NCCP Level III badminton coach and is also one of the province’s NCCP Level I and II trained clinic instructors. Since the early 1980’s, King has also been camp instructor at summer badminton camps in Kirkland Lake (NOBA), Thunder Bay (NWOBA), Oshawa (Durham Camps), Nova Scotia (NSBA), New Brunswick, Baffin Island, Saskatoon (SBA) and New York City (USBA). As a result of those camp programs, King developed a high school coach’s program called Focus on Badminton, a program in which school coaches and selected athletes from their schools earned a Level I certification by working with their own athletes under the direction of King and his assistant coaches.
To add varsity badminton to the Ontario Tech program has been King’s dream for decades and the development of character athletes and successful students who develop into successful citizens will remain the goal of King and the coaching staff.
