This season marks the 15th anniversary of Bisons women's soccer being part of U SPORTS play. The program has produced plenty of memories, a number of which co-founders and long-time friends Walt McKee and Gary Johnson won't soon forget.    

"We met each other playing pickup soccer," Johnson says of his relationship with McKee.

"Walter of course was a very good soccer player. He played at the very highest levels in the city and could've played for the national team if he hadn't decided to be a kicker for the Bombers — and I was just raw. I'd played pickup soccer all my life but nothing organized. And we just hit it off."

The creation of the women's soccer program at the U of M is one of the many athletic accolades in McKee's career.  

He was a member of the Bisons football team's back-to-back Vanier Cup championships in 1969 and 1970 while also playing on the U of M's men's soccer and rugby teams. He was also a CFL draft pick of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers as a punter/kicker in 1971 and a founding member of the Winnipeg Fury Soccer Club in 1986, among many other accomplishments.

Additionally, he was part of the U of M's then termed Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation Studies as Athletic Director from 1993-2001. Under his tenure, ten different teams won national championships.

But female footy on campus will always hold an extra special place in his heart.

He and Johnston began playing pickup soccer with anyone interested on campus starting in 1999. The following year, the women's soccer program reached club status.

"We played at the university at lunch time, anybody that wanted to come out and play. We'd have dentists and doctors that were students then that we know. They would come from the medical centre downtown to play and we would give them heck for showing up late," chuckled McKee.

"We had a really good crew, enough for two full teams to play on a field. And we did that that three days a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday."

The club started off by playing Brandon and a few local teams. Then McKee and Johnston got more serious, leading their club into contests against Regina and a few other Canada West teams to show their interest in joining the CIS ranks. By 2005, Manitoba had a full-fledged women's soccer program that was competing in the Canada West conference.

A big reason for McKee and Johnston pushing to get past club status was the presence of athletes such as two-time Olympic bronze medalist, and recent Canada West Hall of Fame inductee Desiree Scott, who played for the Bisons as a midfielder from their inception in 2005 all the way until 2009.

"We had a lot of good players coming up, and a lot of them didn't want to leave the province, so we figured that maybe it was time that we pushed for a program in our city and at our university. We were able to do that," says McKee.

"Having a player like Desiree, look what she's done. Look what she's done for our city, for our country, for our school and all the people that played soccer with her."

The first year of conference play was tough, as all of the top teams were coming from Canada West. But the squad got better year after year, with the best season in program history occurring in 2007. That year the team finished with ten wins and made it all the way to the conference semis. The following season they were ranked in the nation's top ten for 15 different weeks.

Unsurprisingly, Scott was a major contributor during that time, finishing with four different conference all-star nods.

"She's got lots of determination," McKee added of Scott.

"As a player she was determined to make the national team and she did. Her diminutive size didn't stop her. She's got one of the toughest tackles in soccer and she doesn't back down from anybody."

But McKee was also quick to note Johnson's tremendous abilities as an evaluator in being key to the program's long-term success. He would be out in the community scouting and developing relationships with a number of the province's rising stars, a large variety of whom carved out great careers for the Bisons.

"Part of it is putting the right people on the field. I'm not saying we're geniuses or anything like that but we were lucky that we had some really good players, and they helped organize the other players to a certain extent," Johnson says.

"We just had a philosophy that clicked with the girls and they enjoyed it. The other thing that I think we had all the time that we coached together was a good practice squad. People underrate how important that is, to have players that are never going to see the field, but they are going to push everybody. We had that."

Now 15 years later, the duo are happy to see the program that they created thriving under Vanessa Martinez Lagunas. Manitoba has been a consistent playoff team ever since she entered the fold and have come a long way since 2005.

"When I think back to when we started the program, it was just a club and we didn't know how many players we were going to get," McKee says.

"We ended up with 44 players and we practiced at 7 o'clock in the morning. It's completely different than what it was 15 years ago."