For­mer T&T men’s foot­ball team coach, San Fer­nan­do-born Stephen Hart has put pen to pa­per on a three-year con­tract ex­ten­sion with Cana­di­an Pre­mier League (CPL) foot­ball club HFX Wan­der­ers FC.

The sign­ing ex­ten­sion with Hart, who led the club to a sec­ond-place fin­ish last sea­son, en­sures the for­mer Cana­di­an men’s team boss is tied to the CPL club un­til at least 2024.

Hart, 60, is en­ter­ing his third CPL sea­son with the Wan­der­ers since be­com­ing their in­au­gur­al coach in 2018 and sports a 13-15-17 record over­all.

He was named the CPL's "Coach of the Year" in 2020 af­ter help­ing a re­shaped HFX squad that fin­ished in last place in 2019 make the CPL Fi­nals at last sum­mer’s Is­land Games in PEI.

“This club is a project,” Hart told Can­PL.ca about his re-sign­ing. “Any suc­cess­ful sport­ing en­vi­ron­ment has a cou­ple things; sol­id back­room staff, re­al­ly good ad­min­is­tra­tion, and own­er­ship that have a vi­sion. Once you have a sit­u­a­tion like that [like here at the Wan­der­ers], every­one un­der­stands that these things have ebbs and flows and take a while to bear fruit.

“The peo­ple in place at the Wan­der­ers re­alise these things take time, and there are go­ing to be a lot of bumps in the road, but any­thing worth do­ing is go­ing to have that.”

Hart first ar­rived in Hal­i­fax in 1981, go­ing on to have a suc­cess­ful run with club team King of Don­air as a play­er and coach, as well as serv­ing as Tech­ni­cal Di­rec­tor of Soc­cer No­va Sco­tia.

He lat­er joined the Cana­di­an na­tion­al team as a coach at Un­der-17, U-20, and U-23 lev­els be­fore tak­ing charge of the se­nior side on a full-time ba­sis in 2009. He reg­is­tered more than 20 in­ter­na­tion­al wins with Les Rouges and guid­ed Cana­da to the semi­fi­nals of the 2007 Con­ca­caf Gold Cup when he was serv­ing as the team’s in­ter­im coach.

Hart al­so led T&T’s men’s team as man­ag­er be­tween 2013 to 2016 and reached the Gold Cup quar­ter­fi­nals dur­ing his tenure.

Look­ing back at his time in the CPL, Hart sin­gled out two par­tic­u­lar­ly spe­cial mo­ments thus far: the club’s in­au­gur­al game at Wan­der­ers Grounds on May 4, 2019, and a 1-1 draw with York9 FC (now York Unit­ed) at The Is­land Games.

“I re­mem­ber the open­ing game in the sta­di­um, hear­ing the na­tion­al an­them, see­ing the sell-out crowd,” Hart said of the club’s his­toric 2-1 win over Forge FC. “As soon as that first game was over and all the smoke went off in the sta­di­um… it smelled like foot­ball, it had that at­mos­phere that was like, ‘whoa, this is even be­yond what I thought could ac­tu­al­ly hap­pen.

“Against York was the first time I got the deep emo­tion­al feel­ing that the play­ers be­lieved in what we were try­ing to achieve as a club. We were play­ing with 10 men for a huge part of the game. The way they buck­led down… I think any coach be­ing in a sit­u­a­tion like that would al­ways re­mem­ber that.”

The jour­ney to build­ing a cham­pi­on for the city of Hal­i­fax and the Wan­der­ers com­mu­ni­ty con­tin­ues for Hart, who is busy as­sem­bling the club’s 2021 ros­ter, which cur­rent­ly fea­tures 18 signed play­ers (13 are re­turnees from the 2020 CPL Fi­nals squad).

“Sports has al­ways been an av­enue of es­cape and we’re for­tu­nate to be in­volved in it,” Hart said. “We’re lucky that there are a lot of peo­ple that de­pend on the sport to give them that mo­ment away – go some­where with friends, have a meal and some drinks.

“Es­cape is im­por­tant in so­ci­ety and I hope that re­mains with the Wan­der­ers as a big part of that in this city for years to come."