| Dear Coach, You were Right |

Dear Coach Lathrop,

You were right.

I remember my first memory of you.  It was the first time when you came to watch me practice.  At first, you seemed like a grumpy, old man who was going to be hard to please.  I was right on one count.  You were going to be hard to please.  My senior year was the hardest and most challenging year of basketball that I had ever experienced.  But I learned some of the most invaluable lessons from that year, because of you.

Practices were the hardest.  You knew how to weave conditioning into a drill to make it into the most productive drill we could run - there was no slacking off. But practices were simultaneously the best, because you did more than just coach us the fundamentals of basketball, you taught us how to be real men - men with a backbone.  You put us into situations and drills that asked us to gird up and buckle down.  I remember there would be some practices that you would stop us to correct a mistake, and then you would go on for another forty-five minutes as you instilled into us something more.  You instilled more than just physical toughness or basketball smarts, you were instilling wisdom.

Practical wisdom.

You were hard, but you were patient.  At the beginning of the season, you told us that we were going to run the offense your way, and to do that, we needed to set aside our preconceived ideas of how we would want to run the offense.  You were the coach.  It was your team.  We were your players.  And you had 45 years of experience in coaching.  You knew what you were talking about.  You patiently waited as you worked us through the offense.  You wore down our selfish ambitions and desires, and even when star players left the team, you continued to persuade us to play your game.  And then it clicked.  We played the game your way.  You took a group of selfish individuals and turned them into National Champions.  All because we played your way.

You were right.

It was more than just basketball.  It was always more than just basketball.  You reminded us multiple times that no matter how much talent we had, we had to think about where we wanted to be in the long run, because basketball is only temporary.  We had to be wise.  You told us the story of one of your most talented players, who had a scholarship to the University of Kansas, but threw it away; because he made a knuckle-headed mistake.

As Joe put it, you were more than just a coach.  You were a teacher and mentor.  You were a Christian.  You touched and impacted countless lives of young men like myself and my teammates.  You will be missed.  Our prayers and thoughts are with your family.

The Lord gained a great one today.

All photo credits to Hannah Abigail Lopez.

You made us National Champions.