Carleton Ravens head coach Taffe Charles is used to winning.
Whenever he puts on his suit and stands behind the bench alongside the rest of his women’s basketball team, he expects nothing less than a victory.
“I’ve always been a very competitive person,” he says.
That devotion to winning made this past weekend at the Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) Final 8 a tough one to take. The Ravens lost both games — to the University of Calgary and the University of Ottawa — and finished tied for seventh place in the tournament.
It was the type of result that Charles hasn’t experienced too often in his career.
As an assistant coach with the men’s basketball team for nine seasons, Charles won five national championships, including the first title in program history in the 2002-03 season.
But more important than the winning mentality — which Charles says he already had from his days as a player — was learning the “technical” side of coaching.
Lucky for him, Dave Smart, the coach of the men’s basketball team, is not too shabby in that department either.
“Dave helped me a lot. I’ve always understood the game of basketball very well, but the technical aspect of teaching it to other kids is completely different,” Charles said. “The intangible side of coaching, team building and creating a culture, those kind of things.”
“Obviously he’s a great role model,” he added.
Had circumstances been just slightly different a decade ago, Charles would never have gotten the opportunity to use what he learned from Smart.
After winning a fifth national title with the men, he and his wife Christiane had their first child, Maya. Working a full-time job, coaching part-time and now with a newborn at home, Charles said he was “almost out of it.”
“I was ready to call it a career,” he recalls. “And then the women’s job opened up.”
Today, it’s hard to envision anyone else bellowing instructions from the Ravens bench.
Out of the Paint and Onto the Bench
It’s often said that the best players aren’t able to translate their success on the court to a career behind the bench.
Going from shorts and sneakers to suits and clipboards has been problematic for many former athletes — but not for Charles.
Since taking the reins of the team in 2007, he has led Carleton to unprecedented success.
His list of accomplishments includes an Ontario University Athletics (OUA) East coach of the year award in 2010, two division crowns as well as two appearances at the national championships — the only two in program history.
“If I wasn’t there helping [Smart] out and learning from him then maybe I would be one of those coaches who wasn’t very good at it after having a good playing career,” he said.
A dominant forward with the Ravens during his playing days, the affable Charles commanded the paint inside the Ravens Nest from 1990-1995.
During that time — well before the Ravens were the juggernaut they are today — he poured in 2,437 points, which was good enough for an average of 17.4 points per game.
That total puts Charles third amongst the all-time leading scorers in the history of the program, behind only Mike Trout and Bill Holmes.
For his efforts, he collected three straight OUA all-star awards from 1993 to 1995.
The Road Ahead
The next challenge for Charles might just turn out to be his greatest yet.
He will have to find a way to keep his team amongst the best in the country, despite losing two of the best players in program history.
With star guard Alyson Bush retiring along with leading forward Kendall MacLeod, Charles admits it will be “very difficult” to replace them.
However, his opposite number from across the city is confident the Ravens will make it work.
“When he took over, that program never had a history of success and since then they’ve consistently been a very good team,” Ottawa Gee-Gee’s head coach Andy Sparks said. “Taffe will do an awesome job recruiting. I know that they’re not going anywhere.”
In fact, Charles is hopeful that his team will not only remain competitive, but also push the bar even higher — much like he did during his time with the men’s program.
“When we won the first one I didn’t think we would ever get to that point again, but you have to strive for that,” he says. “It’s similar to what I’m trying to do here. You have to think ‘why not us?’ And that’s the only way you can look at it.”
While he admits that it will be incredibly challenging to reach similar levels of success, that certainly won’t stop him from striving for it.
After all, that’s just his personality.
