Memory of a Coach Who Never Quit Keeps an Unlikely Program on Solid Ice

McKenzie applied that same pressure to himself. When he decided there should be a hockey team for high school students in the District who didn't go to Gonzaga, St. Albans or St. John's -- all private schools -- he took the reins.

The idea came naturally to the son of Canadian parents. Next to politics, hockey was his great passion.

"To him, it was a very egalitarian sport," Trish McKenzie said. "If you played football or basketball or whatever, the bad kids are sitting on the sidelines most of the time. In hockey, you have lines. And when your line goes out, you go out, so everybody gets ice time."

That premise loomed large in his vision. He created a team in 2003 with the intent of exposing young people from all backgrounds and all levels of experience to the sport. Through a provisional agreement with the Maryland Scholastic Hockey League, the team could represent Washington International School, which his daughter attended at the time, but use students from five schools.

In the team's first four seasons -- including last year, when it represented Edmund Burke School, which by then had more students on the team any other school -- a lack of depth and a wealth of inexperience led to frequent losses by the league's 10-goal mercy rule.

But each year, a few new players tried hockey for the first time and learned with each practice, each game, each shift.

"I remember we got blown out a few games in a row," said Porter Ryan, a Wilson junior who joined the team last year. "And [McKenzie] managed to find something good to say about each player after each game."

Trish McKenzie remembers her husband writing letters of recommendation for players and advising them on college and their futures. "He saw himself as a real guidance person to them," she said. "It wasn't just, 'This is how you play hockey.' He was involved with them as individuals."

Toward the end of last season, McKenzie started to feel weak. After being pressed by Trish and convinced by a doctor, he checked into Georgetown University Hospital on a Monday. The next day, he received a "Get Well" card from his players. On Thursday of that week, doctors found fluid in his lungs. Relieved to have a diagnosis -- and something so treatable -- Trish e-mailed their 19-year-old daughter Margaret, in Belgium on a college field trip, and 15-year-old son Alexander, who was attending high school and playing hockey near relatives in Canada. "I told them it was only pneumonia," Trish recalled.

Paul McKenzie was in bed at the family's home in Mount Pleasant a week after he first went to the doctor when he began to have trouble breathing. Trish called 911 and administered CPR. Firefighters and paramedics arrived and rushed him to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, but he never regained consciousness. Eighteen hours later, on Feb. 20, 2007, he was dead.

"They said it was pneumonia of unknown otology," Trish McKenzie said. "One doctor says it wasn't so much the germ as how his body reacted to it.

"I don't really think [Paul] had a clue how sick he was. He loved everything he was doing. He loved his family. He would not have wanted to die."