Hall of Fame coaches

This past week, Bret Thompson, the Charlo girls’ basketball coach, was inducted into the Montana Coaches Association Hall of Fame. He has had a great coaching career, and I believe Charlo has been lucky to have him.

Speaking of great coaches, I have been lucky to have a few. My basketball career started at a very young age. My dad was my first coach, and for some reason he was under the impression I was going to be a post player. I ended up as a point guard, but I still have some sweet moves under the basket. 

My dad, also known as Papa Rick, had a short fuse when it came to lazy defense. He was all about playing defense, and dribbling with your off hand, which I learned to do early on.

My next coach was Bruce Beaudry, who was the organizer of our kids’ basketball program. We all looked forward to playing before the start of the varsity games. We even got to run out around the court with music. Funny story about that, one time I was the leader running out, and ran directly into the kid coming from the other side. Talk about a train wreck. Just imagine 10 little kids piled up beneath the basket.

Anyways, Mr. Beaudry had an important part in my basketball career. He coached all sorts of sports, and was our fifth and sixth grade basketball coach. I was a fourth grader and got moved up into the “big leagues” so we could have a team. With five us, we never had subs. We won almost all of our games though, and he taught me an important lesson. Sometimes its more about quality than quantity.

Mr. Beaudry passed away a few years ago, but I will always credit him for making me a good player.

Moving into junior high, I had the privilege of being coached by Charlie Robinson. He is a member of the Montana Coaches Association Hall of Fame, won three state championships with the Kremlin-Gildford Cougars of the Hi-Line, and had over 800 wins between boys and girls basketball.

I had him as a junior high track coach in Blue Sky, just down the road from Joplin-Inverness, and next to K-G. He was truly a great guy, and very supportive of me, even into high school when he coached on the opposing team in Chinook. As a side note, Blue Sky, K-G, J-I and Chester make up around 60 miles of the Hi-Line. Today, the seven towns in that stretch are two Class C schools, which are the Chester/Joplin/Inverness Hawks and the North Star Knights.

Robinson died of a heart attack a few years ago, much too soon. At 68, he had at least another 500 wins left. I’m sure of it.

Even with these awesome coaches, there is one I just missed that I still wonder about. Dustin Gordon, a fellow MHSA Hall of Fame inductee this year with Bret Thompson, coached in Chester until I was an eighth grader. I was very excited to have him as a high school coach. I watched him take four straight teams to the state tournament, and was itching for my chance to learn from him. 

In his last year in Chester, he took the newly consolidated C-J-I Hawks to a state championship, where they lost to a tough Reed Point/Rapelje team by five points. After that year, he moved to Fairfield to coach the Lady Eagles to four state championships and 120 straight wins, a streak that is the sixth longest in the nation. 

Every summer in high school, I would go to his camp in Fairfield for a week and receive tips from him and a number of other great coaches, including Chester alumnus Jeff Graham, whose Belt Lady Huskies have won three straight state championships. I know we don’t all appreciate our coaches all the time, and in small schools especially, communities can be pretty tough on them. I was pretty hard on the coaches I had. I didn’t really like being told what to do or when to do it. Actually, now that I think about it — not much has changed.