Kinley Has Given His Life To Sport - From the Senior Scope, V13N4 -- By Scott Taylor

It’s probably worthy of a place in the Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame when a man or woman is the founder of one major sports organization.

Al Kinley is responsible for three.

Already a successful minor baseball coach, in 1977 he became a founding board member of the junior Elmwood Giants.

Already a coach with the WHSFL’s St. John’s Tigers, he and his friends created the East Side Eagles Football Club on his kitchen table and he immediately became the bantam coach. Within three seasons, the Eagles won back-to-back provincial titles.

And already a Phys. Ed. Administrator, he got his hands on 140 sets of football equipment – for the grand total of $1 – and used it to create the Maples Collegiate Marauders, the first suburban team in the Winnipeg High School Football League.

Allan Kinley was born in Winnipeg on December 12, 1945. On Nov. 8, just shy of his 69th birthday, Kinley will be inducted into the Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame. No one is more deserving of the honour.

A tremendous athlete, Kinley played on the University of Manitoba’s back-to-back Vanier Cup football championships teams in 1969 and 1970 and was a Canada West all-star in ’68 and ’69.

However, it was years as a coach and an organizer that has earned him an honoured member’s position in the Hall as a builder.

As a baseball coach, Kinley coached the Bantam and Midget teams at Chalmers Community Centre. He also coached the provincial champion Charleswood Bison team in 1976 and won the provincial Midget championship with Chalmers in 1974.

In fact, Kinley has coached so many championship teams in so many sports – football, baseball, volleyball, even gymnastics – that there isn’t enough room on all the plaques in all the Manitoba Halls of Fame to record all of his victories.

And through it all, he was probably the least emotional sportsman in the entire province. When he got the call from Rick Brownlee, telling him he was being inducted this fall, he admitted that he showed very little emotion.

“Yeah, maybe that’s true on the outside, I don’t show my emotions at all,” Kinley said, without emotion. “I think maybe Rick, when he called me, thought I was kind of dead. I sort of said, ‘Wow.’ It didn’t sound like it, but I really meant it. Wow! This is very exciting. It’s something I never thought about until it happened and when I said, ‘Wow,’ I might not have sounded excited, but I was thrilled.”

You can probably forgive Kinley his lack of emotion. He’s spent so much of his adult life keeping his cool that showing emotion doesn’t suit him. After all, this is a guy who has coached football at every level from five-year-olds to Seniors. This is a guy with two national football championships and a guy who has done everything on a baseball field from play to umpire to coach and to organize. In Manitoba sports, Al Kinley is a tall timber.

“I was really thrilled because the people who nominated me started the process a number of years ago,” he said. “People worked very hard to get me in the Hall and I am very grateful. That’s a great thing to do for a guy.”

Al Kinley is a guy who spent 10 years (1979-89) as an assistant football coach at the University of Manitoba, was the convenor and umpire-in-chief for the Red River Valley Sports League and won the 1972 Winnipeg High School Football League championship as a coach with the St. John’s Tigers in 1972.

But through this distinguished career, what was his greatest memory? Which championship or all-star award gave him the greatest satisfaction? Well, none of them, actually.

“My greatest memory is my first experience at coaching,” he said. “I was 17 or 18 and my younger brothers were hanging out at Chalmers Community Centre when Bobby, he was 8, called me, crying, and he said, ‘the man here says we can’t have a ball team if we don’t get a coach.’ So I went down to the community centre and well... You know, I’d like to tell this story at the induction dinner.”

Al, if you’re telling a story, I can’t wait to hear it