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Legends forever linked

Howard, Thomas built a friendship on respect, love for football

The moment called for a celebration, even if for a split second, but Bob Howard wasn’t in the mood as he sat with his head down inside the Webster City football team shed following a 57-20 victory over Norwalk in the first round of the Class 4A state playoffs last Friday night.

Webster City’s head coach had just dropped another bullet point onto his pages-long resume by moving into the all-time top five for wins in the state of Iowa, but he wasn’t patting himself on the back as he shuffled his feet from side to side across the floor.

Instead, he was thinking about his friend. He was thinking about Ed.

“It’s very bittersweet because Ed should be ahead of me,” Howard said only minutes after the 358th victory of his career that has spanned 45 seasons.

In the inner circle that is Iowa high school football, the first name is all that’s needed. Is there a greater sign of reverence?

Ed Thomas, the Hall of Fame coach at Aplington-Parkersburg, most likely would have been in the midst of his 50th season on the sideline this fall had he not been tragically killed by a former player who was mentally ill in late June of 2009. With a win total of 292 at the time of his passing and a career in which he averaged close to eight victories per season, he would have nuzzled close to the 400 benchmark by this point.

Howard thinks he’d already be clear of that hurdle.

“He would have won 10 games a season (over the last 13 seasons), so, yeah, he’d be over 400,” Howard said. “He would have coached until he absolutely couldn’t because it was his life.”

Sitting just 65 miles down the road to the east last Friday, Aaron Thomas, Ed’s son who played a prominent role in helping his community and the A-P school district heal following the shocking death of his dad, caught wind of Howard’s thoughts and it put a smile on his face.

“Coach Howard probably had no idea what that meant to me and my brother (Todd) and my mom (Jan),” Aaron said. “To know that coaches who my dad respected an awful lot are thinking about him, for our family that’s very humbling.”

Aaron also agreed that, yeah, his dad would still be roaming the sideline in 2021.

“I’m very confident if he was healthy he would still be coaching because he absolutely loved it,” Aaron said. “You do the what-ifs with the success that my dad was fortunate enough to sustain over a long period of time and you wonder what it would still look like. How many more times would he have been in the Dome? Maybe selfishly I wonder that because my kids are at the age of playing.”

Cut from the same cloth

In many ways, the career paths of Howard and Thomas are mirror images. Both were small town Iowa boys growing up, Howard from Madrid and Thomas from What Cheer, and both went on to play collegiately in the state, Howard at Central College and Thomas at William Penn.

The next logical step was to get into teaching and coaching. And for decades, they were among the best the state had to offer.

“I wanted to coach from the time I was in the third grade,” Howard said. “Part of it is, 99 percent of the coaches from my generation, we were all influenced by some teacher/coach that we wanted to emulate. When (Howard’s high school coach) stepped out of the shop to go into the hallway, it was like the parting of the Red Sea and it wasn’t because people feared him. It was because they respected him and that really stuck with me.”

Thomas’ career started right here in Hamilton County at Northeast Hamilton in 1972 before he took over in Parkersburg in 1975. Over the next 30-plus years, he turned the Falcons into one of the most feared programs in the state, leading Parkersburg and Aplington-Parkersburg to 19 playoff appearances, six trips to the state finals and two state championships. Four of his players — Casey Wiegmann, Jared DeVries, Aaron Kampman and Brad Meester — went on to enjoy careers in the NFL.

Howard’s career arc took him to similar peaks. After starting out in Scranton, he moved to Sigourney and built Sigourney-Keota into a powerhouse during the late 1980s, the 1990s and early 2000s. The Savage Cobras won state titles in 1995, 2001 and 2005.

Howard took on the chore of rebuilding Webster City in 2007, a program that hadn’t seen the playoffs in close to a decade. All he’s done over his 15 seasons with the Lynx is lead them to the playoffs 12 times and their only appearance in the state finals in 2016.

Over the course of those many years in the spotlight, Howard and Thomas developed a bond based on their affection for their craft and their love of the kids they coached. They spent hours communicating over the phone and it wasn’t unusual to see them together at the many football clinics they attended across the state. And if neither of their teams were playing in the state semifinals or finals inside the UNI-Dome, there was a good bet you could find them sitting together in the northwest corner.

“I don’t even remember when we first met,” Howard said. “It was a great relationship and I miss it, but I think the relationship I had with Ed, he probably had with several other coaches too. You very seldom heard something negative about him, and if Ed said something negative, you were probably doing something wrong.

“I wish I could have been as good a person as he was, that’s something I strive for all the time. But that’s a pretty high bar.”

“They were close friends, especially in the football ranks,” Aaron said. “They were both so football crazy. When I went and talked at Webster City and went in to see Coach Howard, he was in his office drawing up single wing plays. I chuckled because that’s what my dad would do in his office as well.”

Giving Back

No football coach in the state has hoarded success over the past 15 years more than Dowling Catholic’s Tom Wilson. He led the Maroons to — count them — seven consecutive state championships from 2013 to 2019, and that followed up his first title in 2010.

If you want to put a face on the profession, it’s currently his.

Wilson, in his 30th year as a head coach, also has a unique perspective on both Howard and Thomas due to his many interactions with them during the earlier days of his career. He began at tiny English Valleys High School, just 17 miles down the road from Sigourney, and spent several years tangling with Howard’s juggernaut program.

“The first time I coached against Bob, I was really, really young and the score wasn’t real good on our end,” Wilson said with a chuckle. “It didn’t take me long to figure out his teams were disciplined, they had great fundamentals and a culture of winning. As a young coach, I’m not sure I’d ever seen anything like that before.”

Wilson went on to a stint at Wilton and then at Dike-New Hartford, where he faced Thomas’ A-P program more times than he can count. But while he and Thomas were adversaries between the lines, they were friends outside of them and he leaned on Thomas for advice.

“I’d heard so much about Ed through the years that I wanted the chance to coach against one of the best,” Wilson said. “His program, honestly, mirrored a lot of what you see from a Bob Howard team in that there was accountability, a lot of hard work and fundamentals. Ed and I would see an awful lot of each other and I feel like there was a great mutual respect. When I was looking at other jobs, specifically the Dowling job, Ed was one of the guys I talked to about jumping from a smaller school.”

Wilson led Dike-New Hartford to the state finals three times and twice met up with Howard. Wilson got the better of the match-up in the 1998 semifinals, but two years later he was denied a title by Howard in the state finals.

Wilson credits both legendary coaches for helping him to build a foundation that he carried to Dowling.

“I can remember specifically listening to (Howard) talk at the Jefferson clinic,” Wilson said. “He was talking about leadership and, honestly, that had a profound effect on me because he did a lot of things to build that culture. I started talking to him a little bit more on the side and he was very helpful.”

Coaching Unicorns

Howard often shies away from career milestones because, as he says it, that means he’s a lot closer to the end than the beginning. At 68 years old, he’s now on the take it year by year plan, not knowing from day to day what the future holds.

He’s proud that he’s approaching 50 years in the profession and the friendships he build with colleagues like Thomas, Bob Sanger at West Hancock, Curt Bladt at Harlan and Tom Stone at Pekin. He has a suspicion that type of longevity will be as uncommon as his famed single wing offense for future generations.

“I think 10 or 11 years ago, there were still 10 guys coaching who were over 70,” Howard said. “Now, I think I’m the third oldest coach in the state at 68. I think a coach that goes 20 years now will be the equivalent of my generation that went 40 because they won’t be able to take the scrutiny.”

When Howard and Thomas were in their heydays, they were the first and last words with their programs. Right or wrong, that’s just how it was.

But times change.

“They coached in an era where the coach was never wrong,” Aaron Thomas said. “I know not everybody loved or agreed with my dad all of the time, but they respected him because there was a passion for what they did. There’s nowhere that my dad wanted to be than Parkersburg and Aplington-Parkersburg, and I know Bob felt the same way about Sigourney and then when Webster City came up he felt that for there.

“Over the years, my dad was invited to so many weddings of former players. It’s stuff like that, that’s the piece that I’m afraid my generation may be missing.”

Though not in the same generation as Howard and Thomas, Wilson may eventually reach their level of tenure. But he agrees that type of longevity is unlikely to be duplicated by many coaches moving forward.

“They came in at a time where student-athletes looked at a coach as somebody really special,” Wilson said. “Especially looking at Bob and Ed, they have been a father figure to many, many kids and I can’t think of two better people do to that with the respective communities they worked.

“That generation, they just do it because that’s what they loved to do with their spare time. Today we’re in a little different world because there are so many options for people to do things. I think (coaches) of this generation get burned out with expectations and the coach certainly isn’t always right.”

Howard will think about what his future holds, well, in the future. Currently, he’s too busy preparing his current WCHS team, ranked No. 8, for tonight’s Class 4A state quarterfinal against No. 2 Cedar Rapids Xavier. It’s his 28th state playoffs team, the fifth-most all-time, and his fourth squad to reach the quarterfinal round in the last seven years.

But when it is his time to step aside, he doesn’t want to be remembered for the wins and personal accolades. Those aren’t why he entered the profession and they’re certainly not why he’s remained for so many years.

At the end of the day, it’s about the kids. It always has been and it always will be.

“I hope I gave (players) the qualities that helped them to become successful adults,” Howard said about what he wants his legacy to be. “I hope they’ve got fun memories to look back on and winning is part of that, but it’s not all of it.”

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