Senior salute: Athletics a family affair for Skyview’s Cody McKinney

Cody said he’s had a love/hate relationship playing for his mom.

“I love how she pushes me to better, and I know how to work with her,” Cody said. “But I hate getting yelled at. She’s a pretty intense coach. There have been multiple times when I’ve said something dumb and then had to run laps around the track.

“But she’s always made me a better player, and I wouldn’t give it up for anything. It’s been a great experience, and she’s a great coach for our team.”

Athletics have always been a part of the McKinney household. Cody’s older brother Jackson was an All-Region wrestler at Skyview and continues to compete at Oregon State.

“My brother has always been a driver for me, help inspire me,” Cody said. “He’ll lift weights with me and teach me how to do things. He always keeps my head right. I could always call him for advice, too.”

Unlike his brother, Cody was drawn more to soccer and basketball, even if that sometimes made life hectic.

“It’s always been hard because they often overlap in the (high school) offseason,” Cody said. “There were times I would go from a basketball game to a soccer game and right back to another basketball game. It was kind of a runaround. But I loved it, so it was worth it to me.”

At Skyview, he even dabbled in football, serving as one of the Storm’s kickers his junior year with soccer teammate Evan Saftich.

“Me and Evan were lifting weights at school when we started talking to” football coach Steve Kizer, Cody said. “We had been watching the games and seeing that their kicker was struggling. So we started the conversation of ‘Hey, we can kick for you.” … And that turned out to be a super fun experience.”

Cody didn’t play football his senior season because he wanted to get an early start with his teammates preparing for the basketball season.

As the Storm’s defensive stopper, often drawing the opponent’s biggest or best player, Cody McKinney helped Skyview reach the 4A state quarterfinals at the Tacoma Dome.

“My basketball experience this year was everything I could ask for,” Cody said. “Our team, we worked out together and we pushed each other as a team as much as we could. Our outcome was good, even though it wasn’t what we wanted to be. We came together as a team, and I learned so much about life and basketball. The state tournament was one of the coolest experiences that anyone could have.”

Soccer was a sport that Colleen McKinney never pressured her sons to play simply because she played and later coached.

“So every time Cody kept wanting to play soccer, I’d be ‘OK, you’re sure?’ ” Colleen said. “You don’t want to put that pressure on your kid. It was something that was important to me — to make sure it was something he wanted to do. I think I started to annoy him after a while that I’d keep asking him that question. He’d be ‘Mom, I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t want to do it.’ ”

This lost final soccer season takes added significance because it was to be Cody’s last as a competitive player. A Running Start student, Cody will enroll at Washington State in the fall and study construction management.

“I had put a lot of thought into it, because I received a lot of messages” from college coaches, Cody said. “I could have gone with a smaller school for sports, but I never fully committed myself to that idea because, academically, I wanted to have a good future and find the right school where I could do that.”

Colleen added: “This would have been (Cody’s) last bow under the lights, but it’s that way for a lot of kids. Cody’s story is a reflection of so many others. But you hope he’s built up enough memories and he can look back and define what has been great. And it’s true of all eight of these (senior) boys. They built up a tradition of success at Skyview … And that’s a gift that they might not recognize right away, but will later.”

Still, Colleen McKinney witnessed firsthand the emotion of a parent coaching a child one last time when watching Matt Gruhler and his son Kyle at the end of the basketball season.

And now she’s lost sharing a similar moment with her son in soccer.

“I never intended to end up coaching my own children when I got into coaching,” she said. “And I didn’t realize how much it would mean to me in the end.”

Tim Martinez is the assistant sports editor/prep editor for The Columbian. He can be reached at 360-735-4538, tim.martinez@columbian.com or follow his Twitter handle @360TMart.