People
A New Home Court
Daughter's illness lends new meaning to ‘winning' for former top Gryphon coach
BY LORI BONA HUNT
There was a time when Linda Melnick measured success by wins and losses. That was when she was the award-winning coach of the Gryphon women's volleyball team, and life was all about practices and games, medals and championships.
Back then, the rules of the game were clear, and Melnick knew exactly how to play. To win, you had to be better, faster and smarter than everyone else. It meant planning, developing strategies and working hard. Luck had very little to do with it.
She did just this, leading the Gryphon women to the provincial playoffs eight out of the 10 seasons she coached and breaking into the Canadian Interuniversity Sport “Top 10” for the first time in U of G history.
But in 2003, Melnick discovered that the rules of the game of life are much different. That was the year her older daughter, Kory, then five, was diagnosed first with a rare immune deficiency disorder and later with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Cancer forever changed Melnick's definitions of “coaching,” “winning” and “losing.”
“Victory didn't mean a shiny medal to look at, then put away,” she says. “It really meant my daughter's life.”
She now has a new definition of success — as well as a new job and educational challenge to go with it. Last fall, she was named manager of business and client services for the Department of Athletics and enrolled in U of G's MA (Leadership) program.
These days, instead of practice schedules and game times, it's dollar signs and locker-room layouts that consume her thoughts, along with homework.
In her new position, Melnick has helped revamped how Athletics operates, including introducing a long-awaited online registration for all memberships and Athletics Centre programs, and is in charge of customer service.
This means she constantly frets about whether the software program that runs it all is free from glitches and whether there are any mishaps or complaints.
On top of that, she must ensure that the 12 units in the Department of Athletics end up with balanced budgets, which total more than $5.3 million. This explains the stacks and stacks of papers that cover her desk, most of them containing boring-looking charts and lots of numbers and dollar signs.
When every computer runs smoothly, people are happy and the bottom line balances, Melnick considers her day a success. This new definition still surprises her at times.
“You dedicate your entire life to a profession, you think it means everything. Suddenly you have a crisis, and it's like: ‘What was I thinking? This isn't important.' I basically walked away from coaching, just like that, and never looked back.”
Melnick, a former OUA all-star and captain of the York University team that won five OUA championships, never planned to be a coach. The U of G job just sort of came up, she says. But soon after joining the Gryphons in 1994, she realized she had found her calling. “I never imagined doing anything else.”
Her players meant everything to her, and she wanted nothing more than to watch them succeed — on the court, in the classroom and in life.
A few years later, she met a firefighter named Brian at a wedding. They ended up getting married themselves and eventually had two daughters — Kory and Robin, now eight and six, respectively. Although family became her priority, Melnick, a self-acknowledged “superplanner,” found a way to do it all.
She never missed a practice or a game until her child became ill. Kory had been sick all winter, seemingly catching one virus after another. There were trips to the doctor's office, speculations about colds and flu and finally blood tests.
Then came the call: get Kory to the hospital — now. The blood tests revealed a platelet count that was dangerously low; the situation was critical.
“It was one week before the OUA championships,” says Melnick. “I had spent five years working with some of the players on that team, and we had already been through so much, including the death of one of the players, MaKala King, in a car accident.”
She recalls sketching out practice schedules from the hospital while they awaited news about Kory.
A diagnosis was slow in coming. First, it was leukemia, then the conclusion was hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis, a rare immune disorder that required months of chemotherapy. A year later, Kory found a lump in her arm and was diagnosed with cancer.
Melnick took a leave from coaching and from U of G to care for her daughter during this time. She also walked away from a prized gig as coach of the Ontario Canada Games provincial team, which went on to win the gold medal at the Canada Games.
In spring 2005, Kory had a stem-cell transplant courtesy of an anonymous donor. She was in Toronto's Sick Kids Hospital for two months, and Melnick and her husband stayed at the Ronald McDonald House most of the time. It was there she realized for the first time that her coaching skills served her well off the court.
“I interacted with nurses, set goals with doctors, devised strategies to keep my family intact. Not only was motivating my daughter a challenge, but I was also motivating other parents around me who felt as though they had no one in their corner, so to speak.”
At times, however, being a coach was a hindrance, especially when it came to dealing with cancer statistics, says Melnick. For the first time in her life, she ignored the numbers.
“I knew they were there, and I know, as a coach, that statistics have validity. But I don't think I ever believed for a second that Kory wouldn't get better, despite what the stats said.”
Still, there were times when she was tempted to “give in to the insanity. The easy thing to do would be to succumb to it, actually let your brains pour out of your head because that is what it basically feels like.”
Kory is now 19-months post-transplant, is back in school and is taking horseback riding lessons. There are still visits to clinics, tests and more tests, and occasional scares with high fevers. The family is counting the days until the two-year mark.
“That means she'll have a chance to live a long, fulfilling life,” says Melnick.
Somehow, the experiences of the past few years made returning to coaching impossible for the two-time OUA West Coach of the Year and the 2003 Fox 40 OUA Coach of the Year.
Instead, she applied for her current management position and enrolled in the leadership master's program. Getting a master's degree was always a personal goal, and her daughter's illness provided an extra push.
“I realized I could keep ‘my head in the game' in times of crisis and thought I should expand on my ability to do so. I wanted to ensure that what I contributed as a leader was not just my ‘best guess' but was also founded in theory.”
In addition to the challenge and draw of learning new things, being back in school offers another attraction: distraction. Studying and assignments mean there's less time for her mind to wander to other, more unpleasant subjects.
“It's helping me hold on to my sanity,” she says.