Adams and I have a long-term basketball connection

When the telephone rang for the third time on the afternoon of March 14, I was getting tired of having to get up, walk over and answer it. As much as I hate to get up while watching Law & Order in the afternoon, most of the calls I receive are important enough to warrant my undivided attention. This one was no different.

It was Dave Adams at Nevada High School calling to tell me of his resignation as principal to take a like job at Blue Springs. "I just wanted to call and let you know," Adams said to me.

I appreciated the call very much because Dave and I go back a long ways with our years being inextricably woven together through basketball.

My first contact with Dave Adams came when he was a young high school basketball player at Metz High School. I had just started working at the Nevada Daily Mail and in these days Metz and Bronaugh had one of the most heated blood-feud rivalries you have ever seen. I first began to cover the grand old Metz Tournament when Dave was playing for Wayne Reinert, then Ed Tourtillott. I'm sure Dave glanced over to the west wall more than once where I often stood and chatted with his dad and whoever else populated that area.

After high school, Dave disappeared for awhile and showed up in Nevada once in a while to officiate a Tiger basketball game. He later did student work here when his sister, Karol, played for the Nevada Lady Tigers. So as far back as I can remember, Dave Adams was associated with basketball in one way or another.

After a successful stint as Rich Hill coach, Adams succeeded Bill Holmes as head coach of the Nevada Tigers. While it was a job he long coveted, Adams was very close to slipping his head into a noose. The Tigers were awful in that inaugural 1985-86 campaign. Four games into the season the Tigers beat Liberty 46-45 in the Ray-Pec tournament and won only three more times all season. And it got worse the next year. A losing streak carried over from season to the next and reached 15 before the Tigers defeated Leeton for one of their two wins that season.

Dave began to have a lot of self-doubts about his coaching ability that season and I was at least one who propped his waning confidence because I was quick to point out he got all out of that team it could give him. At one point, his record at Nevada was 18-57 and somewhere along the line Adams mused that he would never reach .500 lifetime. Little did he know that the best years in Nevada High School basketball history were coming and before it was over, he would be the school's all-time winningest coach.

We must have traveled many thousands of miles together on the bus over the years with the only constant faces in an ever-changing cast being those of Adams, Lex Blue and myself. From that 22-5 team in 1989-90, the Tigers came on and won 30 games in a row the following season and finished second in the state. That was the year his then freshman assistant, Kevin McKinley coined the term "Death Tour" to describe the condition of my health. I was on death's doorstep after not having even visited a doctor in 20 years and never got to enjoy that season as much as I would have liked. The latter part of the season sailed by like a dream. I began to feel really bad during the Clinton tournament and I can still remember the crowd chanting, "Seventeen and oh," after the game. They were still doing it after our first game in the finals at Springfield.

Dave's sport away from basketball was golf, and through that sport he formed a close relationship with my dad and was an honorary pallbearer at his funeral in the spring of 2002.

I haven't spent as much time with Dave as I did when he was coaching. Oh, we went to a few basketball games now and then, but there is no way to recapture the fun and glory of those years in the early 90s.

I don't look for Dave and Shelly to spend that many years in Blue Springs. I suppose they'll be back when he gets in his 30 years, which isn't far down the line.

The run was long and it was fun, even though we did disagree more than once. Good luck up in Blue Springs and if you run into another of my coaching friends from long ago, Gil Hanlin, tell him "Hi" from me.