Thirty years is a long time to be doing the same thing, but Liz Mackenzie (Tuks) is as fervent about squash as the first day she started coaching.
She certainly has no plans to stop in the foreseeable future. Helping youngsters to master life skills while hitting and chasing after squash balls is apparently one of the most rewarding jobs there is.
Mackenzie’s passion was justly rewarded during the annual Squash South Africa awards function. She received the Biddy Castle-award as coach of the year. She is the first recipient.
“It is a huge honour for me. What makes it more special is that it was Biddy Castle who got me interested in taking up coaching. I attended one of her courses while I was at Pretoria Girls High School.”
Mackenzie used to be quite a good player. In 1981 she was ranked as the top female player at Tuks. She tried competing internationally, but due to the politics at that time it was near impossible.
Her playing career effectively ended after she was involved in head to head crash with a tractor just outside Tzaneen. Due to the severe neck injuries, she sustained she could never play again, but there was no way that she was just going to walk away forever from squash. So she started coaching. It is a decision she never regretted.
When asked what she considers to be the highlights of her coaching career Macenzie jokingly referred to herself as a “trailblazer” due to the role she played in creating an international awareness for squash.
“In 1984 I coached at a kibbutz in Israel. There was no official squash court, so one of the barns was converted to be a court. I could speak no Hebrew. I only two words one of which was Shalom. To complicate matters, the Israeli’s did not understand English. However, the language barrier was not going to stop us. I demonstrated what they needed to know. When they mastered something, I praised them using the only other Hebrew word I knew which was good. The better they got, the more repetitive my use of the word good became.
“I also coached in Minnesota, USA. At the time the Americans just started to take to squash. The problem was that there were not really any proper squash courts, so I coached on racquetball courts.”
Another definite highlight for Mackenzie was coaching Tuks’s first Protea player, Wian Lourens, in 2008. Since then another eight Tuks players went on to represent South Africa. She is also quite a proud of the fact that up to now more than a 100 Tuks players were ranked in the top ten in South Africa.
Mackenzie admits there is a thrill to it when one of her players wins a major tournament, but for her, it is never just going to be about beating your opponent on court.
“As a coach, you get to change people’s lives for the better, and that is the real reward of my job.”
She prefers not to answer the question as to how long she intends to keep on coaching.
“There are so many milestones I still want to achieve. I truly don’t know when I am going to stop coaching. Every time a new youngster step onto the court for the first time, and I see their sense of expectation I get motivated all over again.”
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