Hockey coach leaves PI ‘Cats> MacIntosh wants to stay home

Rod MacIntosh still isn’t sure if he did the right thing, leaving Presque Isle’s varsity ice hockey team after two years, but something kept pulling him home.

“The story is a bunch of personal reasons, and a job came up, Southern Victoria High School here in Perth Andover, [New Brunswick] which is my old school,” MacIntosh said. “The last three or four years, I had been looking at it, and historically, coaches hang for quite a while.

“It was a hard thing to do because the people in Presque Isle were great, the support was unbelievable,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it, and I probably won’t again.”

MacIntosh and his wife, Colleen, coach ice hockey, MacIntosh at Presque Isle, and Colleen for their son’s atom-level team in their hometown of Perth Andover.

“I knew [the job] was in the works late last season and I talked to [Presque Isle Athletic Director] Jeff Bearden to prepare him,” MacIntosh said. “I will probably wonder if I made the right decision for a while, but my son will be that age in four or five years, and I’ve never coached him, but I’d like to coach him for a year or two.”

The inevitable travel demands, ranging from the 40-minute, one-way drive to Presque Isle every day, and the three-hour game trips played into Southern Victoria’s favor when it came to luring MacIntosh away.

“It was just a lot of time and I think I found myself dragging a little too thin,” he said. “Our closest rink is the [University of Maine’s] Alfond, that’s three hours, but you really kind of get in tune with it. The real killer was the Kennebec Rink [in Augusta], but we learned how to travel.”

The winners of a jump-off for first place in the high jump and pole vault will now be recognized for those efforts.

The National Federation of State High School Association’s Track and Field and Cross Country Rules Committee’s modified the previous rule, which did not allow tie-breaker results to credit a better performance in the jump-off, during a recent meeting.

Field events drew most of the rules committee’s attention as they attempted to bring those outcomes more in line with the track events’ performances and recognition of winners.

Eliminated was the use of the least number of attempts as one criteria for breaking ties in the high jump and pole vault, a rule change which will take effect in the 1996-97 indoor season.

Fears that the current rule encouraged competitors not to jump and was being used more as strategy encouraged the committee to change the rule.