Spooner took the long road to a 'blessed' coaching life

In his day job teaching freshmen at a high school in rural Illinois, Brian Spooner sometimes tells his students about his summers growing up in North Idaho.

Going swimming. Jumping off bridges, and cliffs.

Living across the river in Post Falls, up the side of a mountain.

In contrast to where he lives now.

“I live basically in the middle of cornfields here ... it’s all flat,” he said over the phone last week, from Clifton, Ill. “Corn fields, and maybe a few oak trees.”

But sometimes paradise comes in other ways.

A high school friend reading in a magazine about a fledgling college football program in Illinois turned out to be the impetus for Spooner to seek a change of scenery, as it were.

He scratched the itch to play football again, something he last enjoyed at Post Falls High. That led to teaching, and coaching.

And more coaching.

In three decades there, he’s found stability, family, and success as a small-school high school football coach.

He’s been a head football coach for 24 seasons, the last 21 at Central High in Clifton, where his record is 147-77, and his teams have won nine conference titles, advanced to the state semifinals (in a 32-team playoff) twice, and made it as far as the quarterfinals four other times.

At Martinsville, Spooner won a conference title, and his team advanced to the second round of the playoffs.

All told, his record in 24 years as a head coach is 161-92.

Recently, Spooner was inducted into the Illinois High School Football Coaches Hall of Fame.

“It’s been a great experience,” said Spooner, now 52. “I love being around kids.”

SPOONER WAS born in Grossmont, Calif., near San Diego.

In fourth grade, his family moved to Harrison, where he spent less than a year.

They moved to Coeur d’Alene for about a year and a half, then moved to Post Falls at the start of sixth grade.

As a ninth-grader, Spooner recalled riding his bicycle to football triple-days at Post Falls High in August — many times back and forth, three times a day, 6 to 7 miles at a shot, practicing under head coach Nick Menegas, and assistants such as Steve Long, Dan Nipp, Bob Reese and others.

Only one thing — freshman football didn’t start until school began, after Labor Day.

“Me and one other freshman didn’t get the memo that if you were a freshman you didn’t have to go to triple-days,” Spooner discovered later. “And they really didn’t tell us until it was over. We got the crap beat out of us every day. I don’t even know if they noticed (we were freshmen). Maybe they thought we were sophomores.”

SPOONER PLAYED varsity at defensive tackle and offensive tackle for two seasons at Post Falls, coached by Reese (O-line) and Nipp (O-line and D-line). He said he was roughly 6-2 1/2, 220 pounds as a senior, big for a lineman at the time.

As a senior in the fall of 1984, Post Falls shared the league title with Kellogg, but earned the league’s berth to the state playoffs by beating Kellogg during league play.

“When I was a senior, I thought of becoming a conservation officer, and going to the U of I,” Spooner recalled. “(But) Idaho didn’t have a football scholarship to offer.”

He ended up going to Boise State, where he redshirted on the Broncos’ football team, but left after one year.

He returned to North Idaho and enrolled at North Idaho College, where he and a friend discovered they could receive college credit for coaching.

By then, Menegas had moved on to Lewiston High, replaced by Brad Murray, the former Wallace coach. Murray agreed to let Spooner and his friend help out coaching the Trojans that year.

“When I left Boise State, I didn’t feel like at the time I would ever play football again, and that year of coaching really brought back my passion and love for the game,” Spooner said.

JOHN BLAIR, who was Post Falls’ quarterback when Spooner was a senior, saw in a magazine where Greenville College, a small private school in Greenville, Ill., was starting up football.

“And when he came home in 1987, after they had their first season, he came home at Christmas and convinced me that’s where I needed to be,” Spooner said.

Spooner checked it out and ended up playing three seasons at Greenville (that’s all the eligibility he had left). There, he met Leigh, who would become his wife in 1995.

After college, he coached at Greenville High, then coached five years at Martinsville — the last three as head football coach — before making the move to Central.

Clifton is roughly an hour south of Chicago. Central High draws from two other nearby towns, all on Interstate 57 — Chebanse, which is north of Clifton, and Ashkum, which is south of Clifton.

Central, with roughly 140 students in the high school, is in the 2A classification — the second-smallest of eight classifications for football in Illinois. Clifton frequently plays larger 3A and 4A schools.

“It’s a great place to coach in terms of expectations,” Spooner said. “Because it doesn’t matter what year it is, the expectation is you’re going to be good. That’s a good thing, but it can also be a curse. ... you really have to work hard to develop kids.”

After graduating from college, Spooner had plans to move back to Idaho. But as the years went on, he was happy with the coaching niche he had carved out in Illinois.

“Between that and meeting a girl, I didn’t think too much about coming back to Idaho,” he said.

Spooner did come back to North Idaho in 2015, for his 30-year reunion at Post Falls High.

Spooner said he grew up much of his life in a single-parent home, so Menegas — and the other Trojan coaches — were part coach, part father figure.

“It was important for me to have that leadership and guidance, but also the discipline and hard work,” Spooner said. “He (Menegas) didn’t speak a lot, he was kinda quiet, but when you got your butt chewed, he was there to give it to you.”

“Just fun-loving, loved what he did,” Menegas recalled of his former player-turned-coach. “Full of desire and effort. Just great feet ... skilled kid. He was just a pleasure to coach. He was good enough to play at Boise State — that’s pretty good.

“That whole group was close, and Brian was just the catalyst of that work ethic that they all provided.”

SPOONER COACHED his oldest son, Brian, now a freshman at Wisconsin-Stevens Point. Their younger son, Brock, is a sophomore involved in track and field football. Their daughter, Brenna, is a fourth-grader.

Spooner said he doesn’t know how long he’ll keep coaching, though you figure at least two more years, while his younger son is still in school. Next year, Spooner will move into administration as dean of students at Central.

What keeps him coaching?

“I don’t know if kids have really changed; to some degree, the way we’ve raised kids has changed more,” Spooner said. “I still love being around kids, through even the good and the bad. Teaching kids about discipline and leadership and sacrifice and hard work are still a very valuable commodity in today’s job market. I’d like to think we do our part in helping prepare kids for that.”

Plus, Illinois has been good to him as well.

“I’ve led a pretty blessed life, to be honest,” he said. “It’s been a great experience here.”

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on Twitter@CdAPressSports.