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 This Iowa high school boys’ basketball coach and her team are making some hoops history By CHUCK OFFENBURGER January 7, 2008 CHURDAN, IOWA There’s a lot that’s unusual about the head boys’ basketball coach at little Paton-Churdan High School here in west central Iowa.  “I’ve pushed the boys pretty hard, and they’re responding well,” Coach Brock said. “One thing that really helped in this situation is that last year, my first year at the school, I served as an assistant coach on both the boys’ and girls’ basketball teams. So I got to know the kids. That got my relationship off to a good start with them. The boys could see from practice that I had played basketball and know the game. When Eddie Lusk, who was the head coach last year, wasn’t coming back, most of the boys seemed enthusiastic about me getting the job.” The Rockets’ co-captains Matthew Fay and Cody Menke, both seniors and both four-year starters, say it’s a whole new atmosphere with Brock as the head coach. “It was kind of odd at first, to think a woman was going to be our coach,” said Fay, “but we’ve gotten used to it now. We knew she loved basketball, and she’s shown us she knows the game well. She works us hard in practice, but it has paid off. We’re playing pretty well now in our games.” Menke said Brock “is just as good or better than any coach I’ve ever had. Players on other teams think it’s a little weird – they’re pretty shocked at us having a girl coach – and there are starting to be some remarks on the Internet message boards. But when we were going to get a new coach, we were all kind of hoping she’d take over. She pushes us, and we respect her. Of my four years, I think this team is the best we’ve had.”
“Back then, the Des Moines Register did a full page spread on me and my team,” said Lori Lane Hawley, who now lives in the western Iowa town of Vail. “Their story said I was the first woman to coach a high school boys’ basketball team in Iowa history.” Interestingly, both these barrier-bending women coaches are graduates of Buena Vista University in Storm Lake in northwest Iowa. But other than that, their stories are quite different. In many ways, Michelle Brock’s story now is even more unusual than Lori Lane Hawley’s was 23 years ago. Coach Lane, back then, had come back to teach and coach in her hometown of Renwick, where she’d been a remarkable athlete before graduating from Boone Valley High School in 1978. “Since it was my hometown, they knew I’d played basketball in high school and when I went on to get my degree at BV,” she said. “So I was probably accepted a little easier than if I’d come from some other place and no one around Renwick knew me.” She, too, spent a year as an assistant coach, and the team went 4-11 that year. “I think that helped me when I became the head coach,” she said. “There was nowhere to go but up.” She coached the Boone Valley boys just one season, posting a 13-7 record. Then she left for Ar-We-Va – the school district serving the town of Vail where she lives now – where she taught and coached for the next two decades. She never coached boys’ basketball again, though, instead directing volleyball and girls’ track. Of course, seeing a trailblazing female coach in a sport in which men had always been the coaches was probably more of surprise in 1984 than it is in 2008. “I sometimes reflect back on how that was my first teaching and coaching job, and think, ‘Whoa! That could have been real trouble!’ ” Hawley now says. “But it wasn’t at all. The kids were respectful. It was a really good experience for me.” Another difference in Hawley’s story back then, and Brock’s today at Paton-Churdan, is their teaching jobs. Hawley recalls that at Boone Valley, she was teaching K-12 physical education and had a high school journalism class. At P-C, Brock is both the vocal and instrumental music director for students from fourth through 12th grades, in addition to being yearbook advisor, junior class sponsor and head boys’ basketball coach. “Not too many band and vocal directors are also head coaches in sports, just because of the time commitments,” said the IHSAA’s Legg. “The fact that Michelle Brock is combining all that, makes that part of her story almost as unusual as her being a woman coaching a boys’ basketball team.” Leonard Griffith, who is principal at P-C High School, appreciates the load that Brock is carrying, and the way she handles it. “Most days, Michelle is the first faculty member here in the morning, and the last one to leave at night,” Griffith said. “She has unbelievable energy.” She has had as much or more success in the school’s music programs than in boys’ basketball. She has about 25 members in both her concert band and in her chorus. “She’s increased the numbers in both programs, and those are good participation numbers in a school as small as this one,” said Griffith. P-C has 41 students in high school – nine seniors, eight juniors, 13 sophomores and 11 freshmen. Most of the students take their general education courses in the mornings at the school in Churdan, then are bussed to the county seat town of Jefferson in the afternoons for more specialized courses at Jefferson-Scranton High School. Brock said while she’d like to have more students at Paton-Churdan, to better ensure the school’s future, at the same time, “it’s the small size of it that makes me like it here so much. It’s so easy to get to know all the kids well.” You know what they are doing now, she said, and you get a better idea of what they are capable of doing, making your teaching mission very clear. She said her love of sports and of coaching traces back to her girlhood in Marengo in east central Iowa. “My dad, Lou Brock, was a coach when I was young – he generally coached the JV boys at Iowa Valley High School – and I was always, always, in the gym with him,” she said. She became a very good softball player at Iowa Valley, a five-year starter in fact, and she also played volleyball and basketball. “I was probably a better softball player than I was a basketball player, but I loved basketball more,” she said. “I was a point guard on our basketball teams, kind of the playmaker that would start-up the offense, and I was pretty fast – back then – so I loved to play defense.” She also sang and played clarinet all the way through high school, and she said it was in her junior year, that her director Jeffrey Heid talked to her about how she might make a good band director. He left at the end of that school year, and his replacement Chad Allard helped her learn how to become a student director in her senior year. After graduating, she enrolled at the University of Northern Iowa in the fall of 2002. But she didn’t feel at home there, and decided to transfer in the fall of 2003 to Buena Vista, which had been another college she’d considered earlier. The rest of her BV career, she said, “I was either in the music building, in the rec center doing intramural sports or out running in the Storm Lake parks.” Her faculty mentor there was Professor Jerry Bertrand, an outstanding instrumental musician and teacher. He’s somewhat of a band music purist, though, and never cared for Brock’s being so nuts about athletics. “Jerry doesn’t think much of me coaching now, either,” she said. “He doesn’t even like it that I’m also teaching vocal music!” Her boyfriend since high school, Phil Grant, whose hometown is Webster in eastern Iowa but who open-enrolled to Iowa Valley, followed Brock to BV. And they’re still together, with Grant working in information technology for Casey’s General Stores at the corporate headquarters in Ankeny. “I get volunteered for a lot of things here at Paton-Churdan,” said Grant, who keeps the scorebook at the basketball games and also played trumpet in the pep band the other night. “I’m always glad to help Michelle here. I really like the people I’ve met here.” Brock got the P-C job after answering the school district’s ad for a music teacher in the Des Moines Register. “I had interviewed at Paton-Churdan and one other school, and I really felt like I was heading to the other place,” she said. “I was expecting a phone call from that school one afternoon in my senior year at BV, so I took my cell phone with me to band practice. It rang, but when it did, it was P-C calling – and I decided right then to take the P-C job.” Principal Griffith, who was on the other end of that phone call, said “you know, good music teachers are hard to find, and we’d been really impressed with Michelle.” She said what appeals most to her about teaching music is that “it is an optional course for kids, so those in it really want to be there. It makes it more enjoyable to teach when you know your students want to be there.” In her first year, which began in the fall of 2006, she was contracted only for the music programs. But when basketball came around, she volunteered to come to the gym after school and help the boys’ and girls’ coaches, if they wanted help. “I thought because our numbers were so low, they might want me to jump in and help scrimmage,” she said, “and that would help keep me in shape.” Coach Lusk began depending on her more and more, and asked if she’d join him on the bench for the boys’ games. She was doing that for the girls’ team, too. In mid-season, P-C Superintendent Jess Toliver amended her contract to make her an official assistant coach, and thus was able to pay her a small coaching salary in addition to her teaching salary. When both of the 2006-’07 varsity coaches were leaving, Griffith, who is activities director as well as principal, offered Brock a choice of either job. She said she felt closer to the boys, thought she might be able to bring them along better and thus accepted that job. P-C then hired Brian Monahan, an alumnus who has a construction company here that builds grain bins, to coach the girls’ team this year. Brock made some abrupt changes. For the first time in a long time, if ever, she set up P-C summer basketball programs with sessions every weekday morning. Mondays through Thursdays, girls came in for one hour, followed by the boys coming in for an hour. On Fridays, girls and boys were there at the same time. Brock “volunteered” her boyfriend Grant, who played basketball in high school, to help her. “What we really stressed in the summer camps was fundamentals,” she said. “Lots and lots of fundamentals. I was on the phone about three times a week to my dad over in Marengo, asking him what new drills I could give the kids so they wouldn’t get bored.” The impact of that on this year’s teams? “Our Paton-Churdan basketball teams this year are not even comparable with our teams last year, in terms of fundamentals,” Brock said. “The kids learned a lot and they worked hard, and we are playing much more sound basketball this year than we ever did last year.” Now, she’s extended the basketball camps to Saturday mornings during the school year, and has the elementary kids involved. Meanwhile, her boys’ team has some real promise. The players have good size, for a Class A team, and fair speed. The starting line-up includes three seniors, Matthew Fay at 5 ft. 11 in., Cody Menke at 6 ft. 3 in. and Zack Davis at 6 ft. 1 in. Dave Campbell, a junior, is 5 ft. 9 in., and Brian Minnehan, a sophomore starter, is 5 ft. 9 in. The Rockets get a size boost when freshmen Cale and Connor Juergensen, who are 6 ft. 4 in. and 6 ft. 3 in., come off the bench. The Juergensen boys are part of triplets, with their sister Mackenzie Juergensen a 5 ft. 10 in. freshman on the varsity girls’ squad. With a current record of 3-5, the P-C boys have already equaled their total number of wins last season, and Coach Brock says there will be more victories coming in their Rolling Hills Conference games. Most opposing coaches have been startled, in the first round of conference games, to realize that when their teams play Paton-Churdan, they’re coaching against a woman. “I was really surprised,” said Greg Gosselink, 55, head coach of the Iowa Christian Academy Blazers. “I didn’t realize it until we got there Friday night, and I picked up the game program and saw Michelle Brock listed as their head coach. I thought it was probably a mistake until I saw the boys’ team photo with her in it.” Brock’s team beat Gosselink’s team, 75-53. “First of all, they were much better than we expected,” Gosselink said. “I was impressed with how she has that team playing. I’ll tell you this, I wish I could get the effort out of my players that she is getting out of hers. I was very impressed, in fact.” Andy Blum, head coach of the Walnut Blazers, whom P-C beat 64-55 in overtime on December 21, said he was also surprised that Brock was directing the Rockets. “I had never seen a female head coach of a boys’ basketball, ever, I guess,” said Blum, 46. “But as a coach, she seems to be intense, determined and very competitive. And she has those boys playing real good ball now. I’ve been watching their scores, and they’re doing a lot better now than they were doing earlier in the sesason.” Blum said there is another impression Brock left on him. “She seemed like a heck of a nice gal when I was visiting with her before the game,” he said. “Good coach.” You can reach the columnist by e-mail at chuck@Offenburger.com.
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