Daniel Futa sat at the edge of his comfy seat, riveted, like thousands of Canadians, by the last moments of the women’s final hockey game televised live from the Beijing Olympics.
“It was just frenetic at the end,” said the retired Scarborough high school teacher who now calls Barrie home.
“I was probably yelling a little bit,” he adds with a chuckle.
Right next to him during Wednesday’s gold-medal match sat a special memento, a puck signed by Team Canada forward Natalie Spooner. On it, a simple message: “To Mr. Futa, You taught me everything I know!”
It's a memento Futa cherishes, but for which he believes he's undeserving.
As a high school teacher at Scarborough’s Cedarbrae Collegiate Institute, Futa adopted the role of staff sponsor for the women’s hockey team.
A hockey coach, Futa stresses, he was not. But he persevered for the team, made up of a collection of players with disparate abilities from the very accomplished, like Spooner, to the uninitiated who relied upon the support of the boards to keep upright.
“She was way beyond anything” he could add to as a coach, recalls Futa of Spooner, who is now a three-time Olympian.
When she inevitably exhausted the allotted maximum of three goals allowed per player, Spooner would get close to the team’s bench and pass off the puck to a teammate in what Futa describes as an orchestrated spin-o-rama style as the teammate then aimed for the net.
Spooner stuck with the team throughout her high school years from 2004 to 2008, roughly half of the 10 years or so Futa remained at its helm, as she pursued the game competitively, continuing on to play with Ohio State University on a full scholarship in 2008 where she set a single-season record for goals scored as a senior and capping off as the university’s all-time leader in goals.
Spooner’s career continued to flourish over the years, marked by participation in the television shows The Amazing Race and Battle of the Blades, as well as the Olympics.
In 2014, she scored the first two goals in Canada’s 3-1 semifinal victory over Switzerland in the Sochi Olympics. Team Canada went on to win the gold medal.
In 2018, she was on the silver-medal-winning team in PyeongChang, followed by this year’s gold in Beijing.
Futa has always maintained he had no role in Spooner’s success. During one of her visits back to her old high school, Spooner caught wind of those sentiments and decided to set the record straight through her message on the autographed puck.
“It was awesome,” beams the retired teacher of his personal treasure and the overall experience with the high school team. “It’s so cool to have had anything to do with an athlete.”
