Coutts, Resby

Year Inducted / Année Intronisé:

2019

Province / Province:

Manitoba

Category / Catégorie:

Board of Governors

Biography / Biographie:

Resby Coutts became the first member of Winnipeg’s Fort Rouge Curling Club to serve in the senior volunteer position at Curling Canada when he took over as the Chair of the Board of Governors for the 2017-18 season.

His election to the board in 2015 followed a six-year term on the board of CurlManitoba, including two years as president, and nearly two decades of volunteer involvement with the major championship events in Manitoba, mainly in media and marketing and as an emcee.

Coutts’s term on the Curling Canada Board of Governors marks nearly five decades of curling volunteerism, beginning when he was intramural curling co-ordinator at the University of Manitoba. He chaired the Manitoba Men’s Safeway Championship in 2013, the first return of the event to Winnipeg in nearly 20 years; co-chaired the 2011 Canadian mixed in Morris, still the smallest community to host a Canadian championship; and was executive director of the 1995 Ford Worlds in Brandon.

As a member of the Board of Governors, Coutts chaired the Constitution Review Committee and spearheaded a major overhaul of the organization’s bylaws.

Recognition for contributions to the sport have come in the form of a Manitoba Curling Association Honourary Life Membership in 1992, inclusion on the Westman Millennium Curling Wall of Fame in 2000, and membership in the Governor General’s Curling Club in 2013. Coutts learned to play and love the game in a one-sheet curling rink in the mid-1950s in the now-disappeared community of Elva, in southwestern Manitoba, and has been playing and competing ever since.