The breeding grounds for Sudbury top-end athletes has not always been linked to sport-specific training centres, blended with individualized workout sessions that give way to camps and off-season tournaments across the province and beyond.

There was a time when athlete development in the north occurred far more organically than this.

Mike Mulvihill is but one of a boatload of locals, including a very impressive basketball contingent, who easily harken back to a much simpler time.

“We lived just down the street from the public school on Tuddenham Street which had the outdoor basketball court,” recalled the now retired Cambrian College educator who grew up in the sporting mecca that was the Gatchell neighbourhood. “We were outside all the time.”

“At this time of year, the days would start getting longer and we would start chipping the ice off the court. All you needed was a ball. And the same thing was happening at King George, at College Street, in various areas of the city.”

Along with his younger brother Dan, Mulvihill would frequent the court with regularity with the likes of Lawrence Bertulli and Pat Signorotti and Mike Petrone and the O’Hearn siblings – all while the next wave anxiously awaited, led by Vito and Eli Pasquale.

“When we were playing on the court, they were the kids on the side, waiting to get on at some point,” suggested Mulvihill with a chuckle.

It was an environment that spawned the growth of a sport in these parts in a very unstructured setting, with organized play by and large not really kicking in until this glut of talent reached the high-school stage.

“In our day, basketball camps were not in existence and things of that nature,” said Mulvihill.

“We all came from neighbourhoods were there were opportunities where the courts were.”

The story is hardly unique to basketball.

For as much as Mulvihill did not venture far along the pathway that was hockey, other Gatchell lads most certainly did. “The Giacomin family lived on Morrison, one street over from Tuddenham,” he said, alluding to the grouping of five very athletic children, including NHL Hall of Fame goaltender Eddie Giacomin.

“There was always a rink at Spiegel playground, always at St Anthony School – and always a rink in the empty lot next to the Giacomin house. And the old Brewers Retail parking lot was always plowed – so after mass on Sunday, there was ball hockey all day until supper.”

The was also a kinship that developed when the world seemed like a much smaller place.

Working in some capacity or another since the time he was in grade five, Mulvihill spent years delivering bread on lunch hours for Cecutti’s Bakery and later doing the same with groceries for Gatchell Meat Market – an outlet that also employed Eddie Giacomin during the hockey off-season in the summer.

Breaking for a beverage, the opportunity to sit and listen to NHL stories was and always will be a “really cool” experience in the mind of Mike Mulvihill.

While grade nine would find Mulvihill part of a city championship midget boys team at St Charles College, the arrival of friends to Lockerby and the numbers game at SCC would open the door to the balance of his high-school career being spent as a Viking.

“There were five grade nine classes at St Charles College when I arrived, with 40 per class,” he said. “It was really competitive to get on a (high-school) team.”

Coaches Mike O’Reilly and Tom Bertrim would pick right up where the Cardinal mentors had left off, with Mulvihill and others building momentum in a program that had picked up steam with Mike Heale as the lead athlete, claiming their first ever city crown in 1974.

It was a special time to be part of the Sudbury basketball community.

“There was a huge influence from (Laurentian University coaches) Norm Vickery and Ken Shields,” suggested Mulvihill. “They would take local coaches to basketball camps. That was really, really good for Sudbury basketball.”

Recruited to L.U. by coach Shields and arriving in a freshmen class that also featured Sault Ste Marie native Mark Bennett and Pat Signorotti and others, Mulvihill and company would make three trips to nationals, all while playing for three different head coaches (Richie Spears and Mike Heale would follow in the footsteps of Shields once the latter received an offer he could not refuse from the University of Victoria).

The man who would graduate from Teachers College at Queen’s University and eventually coach the Cambrian Golden Shield program for a handful of years drew heavily on the legendary future coach of the Canadian national team – and friends.

“There’s no doubt that I have learned from every coach I played for, but I really learned the fundamentals from Ken Shields and Norm Vickery – and how to play with intensity,” said Mulvihill.

Through the support of Fred MacLennan and surrounded by the likes of Louise Hickey and Craymer Forth, Mike Blanchard and Gerry Bertrand, Mulvihill would be instrumental in helping grow the Fitness and Leisure Management program at Cambrian College, all while tackling the challenge of guiding an OCAA basketball team that had gone dormant for a few years.

“I knew this would be a challenge,” said Mulvihill, a the helm of a squad that would eventually find its way to Division II that was “just the right spot” in his mind. “They wanted to hire me as a part-time coach with an honourarium. I said I would come if I could get my foot in the door on staff.”

Twenty-eight years later, he would call it a career, blessed with many a wonderful memory – very few of which, however, surpass the glorious span of his involvement in a sport that he loved, both as player and coach.

Basketball, in much simpler times, could have that affect on young local men.