Coaching or Cancer: Its All About the Team

Copyright © 2014 Rob Drake.

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ISBN: 978-1-4897-0183-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4897-0182-4 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014938706

LifeRich Publishing rev. date: 4/21/2014

CONTENTS

Where It All Started

My First Coaching Job (1982)

My First Teaching Position (1988)

Back to Iowa (1990)

My First Head Basketball Job (1995)

My First Basketball Philosophy (1995)

Play Hard, Play Smart, Have Fun!

Second Season (1996–97)

Third Season (1997–98)

Fourth Season (1998–99)

The 1999–2000 Season

The 2000–2001 Season

The 2001–2002 Season

Boys

Girls

The 2002–2003 Season

The Girls in 2002–2003

The Boys in 2003–2004

The Girls in 2003–2004

My Final Season at West Hancock

My Next Journey

My First Year at East Marshall

My Second Season at East Marshall

My Third Season at East Marshall

Golf

My Fourth Season at East Marshall

My Final Season at East Marshall

My Support Team

Joann’s Reflection

Recommended Reading

To all the men and women who have served this great country, all the people who have served as police officers or firefighters, all the people who have coached high school sports, all the people who have been diagnosed with cancer, and my wonderful and delightful seven grandkids: Noah, Levi, Silas, Zoe, Caden, Olivia, and Sahari, whom I love dearly with all my heart.

Acknowledgments

So many people have helped me in my twenty-eight years of coaching and since I was diagnosed with cancer. I have to start with my wife; JoAnn has been my best friend for thirty-seven years. She has always supported and encouraged me along the way, and I have not always displayed my appreciation like I should have. The love she has shown me during the past thirty-seven years is priceless. She is the one who reminded me on more than one occasion that the players didn’t love basketball like I did. She also fixed my fried egg sandwiches I loved so much when I got home late after games. Since my diagnosis of cancer JoAnn has been my rock. She has driven me to numerous appointments, helped me to understand all of the medical jargon they throw at me, and been my biggest advocate.

Mike Jeresek from Rushford, Minnesota, had a huge influence on me when I student-taught for him in the fall of 1983. Though he didn’t coach with me, he told me I should teach my players how to play man-to-man defense first—even if I was going to play mostly zone. His teams played against us when I was in high school, and they always beat us because of his team’s great man-to-man defense. This included such strategies as wing denial where we would have trouble getting the ball into our offense. This defense, along with always being disciplined on offense, made Mike’s teams tough to beat. I would have loved to coach with Mike, but just getting to know him and picking his mind about why he did what he did while teaching and coaching was a blessing.

Rich Wendorf was the first coach I worked under, and I learned a lot about the X’s and O’s from Rich. We were together at my alma mater, Lanesboro High School, while I was in college at Winona State University.

Kevin Range was the other coach I worked under as an assistant at West Hancock High School in Britt, Iowa. Kevin was as nice a person as you could meet. Kevin also gave me ideas for my offensive philosophy and how I was going to deal with parents. He went back to his hometown and was a very good coach for high school girls. He is now the principal at Spirit Lake High School and is no longer coaching.

Beth Rasmussen of Britt, Iowa, helped me understand the game of volleyball when I was new to it. We had a lot of laughs in our last two seasons as well as a lot of success. She also was a volunteer assistant for me when I had girls’ basketball at West Hancock, which I very much appreciated.

I coached golf with Kim Tarbell, and she taught me so much about the game and how to forget a bad hole and move on. She had the perfect amount of patience for these athletes that had no clue about golf.

My son Nicholas would go through a wall for me, and he worked harder in the off-season than any player I ever coached. He has helped me in more ways than I can say about dealing with cancer. My daughters Stephanie and Ashley have also given me much needed support since my cancer diagnosis as has my daughter-in-law Marsha.

Scott Wheater was my last athletic director—and best I have ever dealt with. He supported me through thick and thin and is a very good friend. Scott was the first person who comes to mind when I think of pallbearers. Scott is a very kind person and friend to me. I respect him a lot.

Bob Sanger who I taught with for ten years at West Hancock and always inspired me with the way he taught, coached, and worked with people.

Darrin Nuese, Christian Grandgenett, and Ryan Hull stepped in for me when I found out I had cancer. The coached the East Marshall girls and made sacrifices so I could concentrate on my treatment.

My mother, Marge Drake, always said she was proud of me throughout my years of teaching and coaching, and she is a very good mother for our entire family. I have often heard that women are the glue that holds a family together; in my mother’s case, that is true.

I can’t begin to name all the assistant coaches who helped me along the way and all the players I have coached over the last twenty-eight years. Most players busted their butts for me and never complained when difficult times arose. The relationships that we make as coaches are a hundred times more important than the wins and loses, which I found out when I was diagnosed with cancer. E-mails and cards poured in with support and encouraging words from former and current players.

Thank you, all. I am truly blessed to have come to know such wonderful people.

WHERE IT ALL STARTED

M y name is Robin David Drake, and I have cancer. Not just cancer, but stage IV lung cancer. They say I am dying, but I choose to believe that I am only living out my life as God planned. I spent twenty-eight years coaching basketball, the sport I had a deep passion and love for. For many of those years, I was the head coach and leader of the team. Those experiences not only helped me to shape the lives of many young athletes but also prepared me for the battle I am now facing. I have a different team now, and God is my head coach. I am simply a member of his team, playing the game plan he has in p lace.

My wife tells me I am a handsome man. I have Norwegian good looks with blond locks, green eyes (I know blue is the norm), and Scandinavian height. At six-three, I have always maintained a healthy weight and lived a healthy, active lifestyle. I may have been shy in high school, but I broke out of that shell long ago. Most would now describe me as opinionated, a bit outspoken, and set in my ways. With those words in mind, let me tell you my story about growing up and then coaching and cancer and how, all through our lives, it is all about the team.

I grew up in Lanesboro, Minnesota, a small town of about a thousand people where everyone knew everyone. There wasn’t anything that most folks wouldn’t do for you, and that included a good whooping if you got yourself in trouble. The town, in the southeastern corner of Minnesota, is surrounded by four bluffs. The Root River stealthily snakes through it. It is a great town for hunting and fishing with many wooded, hilly areas for wildlife to hide. It has become quite famous and been featured in a number of travel magazines for its bike trail, bluffs, and bed and breakfasts. I was proud to be a Lanesboro athlete and good old Minnesota hometown boy.

I have fond memories of playing Little League baseball, backyard football, and youth basketball. It was during these early years I learned the fundamentals of the games like the proper way to grip a football to get a perfect spiral, the correct hand placement on a basketball for taking a spot-on jump shot, and the correct way to slide into third base without being tagged out. I learned why the fundamentals and other traits were so important for being successful in any sport. Competitiveness, hard work, and having fun were some of the things that shaped me and led me to an intense love of sports as a kid and later as a coach.

Dean Mack was a short, athletic, dynamic guy who lived across the street. He was my closest friend in elementary school. Scott Erickson, a fun-loving jokester, lived a block away. The three of us did a lot of things together, including shooting hoops and wandering the woods with a .22 to shoot squirrels. Larry Johnson, another tall Norwegian, was my first cousin and one of my best friends as a kid, but he lived in Whalen, which was five miles away. I spent a lot of nights at his house. His dad owned a mink ranch, and we used to try to catch escaped mink with leather gloves on so the darn little things didn’t bite our fingers. They were stinky little critters and mean, but those were some fun times.

John Ask was as nice as they came and became my best friend during high school. We enlisted and entered the navy together after high school, but the navy had other ideas and sent us our separate ways after boot camp. Other friends were Mark Hall, Joe Peterson, Myron Garnatz, Paul Ulrich, Craig Hanson, Mark Nelson, and Peter Bothum. When we were all able to get together, we played tackle football, baseball, and pickup basketball outside, which is something you don’t see many kids these days doing. When my friends were busy, I would spend hours in my driveway shooting hoops, which I loved more than anything. My love of walking as an adult has seen me covering many miles, and it’s rare that I even see a basketball hoop in a driveway today.

The skills and desire I developed in my youth whether in pickup games with friends or just shooting baskets on my own peaked during my high school years. Most of my success in athletics came during my senior year. In football, we finished 5–4, but I think we could have had a better record if we had passed more. Like most high school teams back in the seventies—and even today—we ran the football a lot more than we threw it. Of course, I thought I was a talented, tall receiver and wanted the ball to be thrown to me. Our quarterback, Dean Mack, could really throw the ball deep even though he was only five-eight, and that’s stretching it. As I reflect on this, I realize that wanting the ball more for myself may not have been an all about the team attitude.

As a senior, our basketball team finished 16–5, and what an enjoyable season it was particularly as I recall my season as a junior. The year before, we were 5–1 going into Christmas break and had a lot going for us. Tragedy struck during the holiday break; we lost our best player Doug Erickson, and our coach, Bob Wallace. Doug died from carbon monoxide poisoning while sitting in a garage with his girlfriend with the car running. He had everything going for him. He was good-looking, smart, and a great athlete in all sports. It just didn’t make sense at the time, and since we didn’t have the counseling back then as we do now, the team never really recovered.

Coach Wallace was the best coach I had in high school, but his health wasn’t the best. He had to take a leave of absence and never coached a game for the rest of the season after Doug’s death. Losing a member of our team and our coach at the same time was a shock to our team. I think we functioned in a fog for the remainder of the season. I know we certainly didn’t play very well and sorely missed our team leader. We finished 5–16, and I went home many nights in tears. I couldn’t stand losing.

Doug dying was my first experience with the death of someone I knew. I shed no tears in front of the team since it was the generational norm that men didn’t cry. Doug was a teammate though and not a close friend, which may have also contributed to my lack of tears. The shock, however, of losing so much in such a short period of time left me feeling emotionally raw. This emotional rawness has also been present in abundance since I was diagnosed with cancer. The support of your team during times such as these is of the utmost importance.

The year we finished 16–5, I was the only senior. I’m sure no one expected much from us since we had done so poorly the year before. I started along with Myron at point, Larry at forward, Joe at guard, and sophomore Jeff Devine at post. He was definitely our best player and provided us with a strong presence inside. He was physically strong and could jump out of the gym; I got the ball to him whenever I could.

We had such good team chemistry, and no one cared who scored the most—as long as we won. It was all about the team. Nearly everyone averaged in double figures. Larry fell just short of that, but he was a great passer. Joe