Doug Cox remembered as more than just a coach

Among other things, Doug Cox was an old-fashioned football coach, a good friend and a wonderful storyteller — sometimes all at the same time.

“He was a coach’s coach. He just lived and breathed football,” recalled Larry Schwenke, who coached football with Cox at Coeur d’Alene High in the 1980s.

“Doug was really our glue when we first started, because he was the guy that broke everything down,” remembered Van Troxel, who hired Cox as a linebackers coach at Lake City when Troxel started the Timberwolves’ program in 1994, and coached with him for more than a decade. “He was such a great guy, and a worker.”

“Doug, besides being an old-fashioned southern gentleman, he was one of the great storytellers of all time,” said Bill Pratt, who taught with Cox for some two decades at Canfield Middle School, and coached the sophomore football team at Lake City for many of the years that Cox was on the varsity staff. “He wrote down a lot of his memoirs of coaching at Bonners Ferry. He basically put together a book about coaching in Bonners.”

Cox, who died Dec. 31 in Manhattan, Kan., at age 78, coached in North Idaho for some 40 years. He was head football coach at Bonners Ferry High for 11 seasons. He was an assistant football coach for nine seasons at Coeur d’Alene High, followed by three years as an assistant at Post Falls High, then 11 years as an assistant at Lake City.

Also at Bonners Ferry, he was head wrestling coach for seven years, assistant girls basketball coach for two years, assistant golf coach for five years and also coached some boys basketball and baseball.

A celebration of life for Cox in Coeur d’Alene is in the works.

TROXEL RECALLED playing against Cox’s teams when Troxel was at Moscow High in the early 1970s, and Cox was head coach at Bonners Ferry.

A few years later, when Troxel was early in his head coaching career, at Hellgate High in Missoula, he got a call from Herb Criner, then an assistant at Boise State, inviting him to bring his players to Bronco football camp.

“And he said Doug Cox is bringing a bunch of guys down from Coeur d’Alene.

“I’ll make you and Doug roommates,” Criner said.

So for the next two years at Bronco football camp, Troxel and Cox were roommates.

“He was just a character, is what he was,” Troxel recalled.

After a couple of years, Troxel then started taking his teams to Vandal football camp. Every summer for nearly four decades, Troxel took his teams to football camp.

However ...

“Those two years of going to Boise and rooming with Doug, besides when my own kids went to Vandal camp, would probably stick out as two of the most dynamic and fun times I ever had in my life.

HERB CRINER hired Cox away from Bonners Ferry. Schwenke and Cox were on Criner’s staff, then coached under Jim Clements. When Clements moved on, Schwenke was named head coach, and Cox was his linebackers coach and defensive coordinator.

Schwenke said Gary “Big Dad” Rasmussen, who went to college with Cox at Eastern Washington, was instrumental in bringing Cox to Coeur d’Alene.

Schwenke recalled how the kids “played their tails off for him.”

Cox was part of Coeur d’Alene’s state title teams in 1982 and ’85.

“I think he understood kids, and how to motivate ’em, and I think he was a master at devising schemes defensively, stunts ... just a real student of the game,” Schwenke said. “He was a tough sonofagun on the exterior, but he was a softy inside with the kids.”

WHEN TROXEL took the Lake City job in 1994, one of the first assistant coaches he hired was Doug Cox.

Cox was linebackers coach, “but really, Doug was the one that trained and coached all of us, especially during those first 4-5 years when we were trying to develop this whole thing,” Troxel said. “Doug was really our glue when we first started, because he was the guy that broke everything down. He was such a great guy and a worker. I came in and supplied the effort, but I learned a whole lot about how to do some little things from Doug Cox.”

Troxel said Cox, along with other assistants like Henry Hamill, Kelly Reed, Roy Carlson, Russ Blank and Butch Perry were key in Lake City’s string of 17 straight trips to the state playoffs, which included two state titles.

Especially Cox.

“He was old school,” Troxel said. “He just wanted us to munch people, get after em.”

BILL PRATT coached basketball at the middle school and high school level in the late 1980s and through most of the ’90s. His wife, Pam, and Doug’s wife, Sandi, worked together in the Coeur d’Alene School District, and the Pratts and Coxes were good friends.

“I think coaches in general have a special bond,” Pratt said.

“Doug loved his coaching,” Bill Pratt recalled. “It was a big part of his life, and who he was.”

Though Pratt and Cox did not directly coach together, Pratt said he enjoyed the give-and-take between Cox and Hamill, both small-school head coaches in the 1970s (Hamill at Thompson Falls), who joined forces in Coeur d’Alene.

“Between Van and Doug and Henry, I learned a lot about football,” Pratt said.

After retiring from teaching and coaching, Doug Cox followed his son, Mike, on his coaching odyssey as a college football assistant — to places like East Lansing, Mich., and Manhattan, Kan. Mike Cox is now an assistant at UTEP.

DOUG COX’s memoirs began with his coaching days in Bonners Ferry, proceeded on to his days at Coeur d’Alene and Post Falls and Lake City, and eventually doubled back to his youth.

One of his chapters reflected on Coeur d’Alene High’s state championship season of 1982. It was Cox’s second year on the Vikings’ staff, and his son Mike was a star senior.

Here’s a portion of that chapter:

“The 1982 football season at CDA was without a doubt the best football season that I will ever remember as a coach and a father,” Doug Cox wrote. “We went undefeated. We won the state championship, and we beat the best team, Gonzaga Prep, in the state of Washington. On a personal side, our son Mike was chosen the player of the year in the state of Idaho.

“We started the season with a great summer camp at Boise State,” he continued. “We went into the season two and three deep at every position. In my opinion, this was one of the best high school football teams in the state of Idaho’s history. I sincerely believe that we could have competed with a lot of other schools in other states.”

In the playoffs, Coeur d’Alene beat Meridian at home, then beat Merril Hoge and Highland in the semifinals at Holt Arena in Pocatello.

In the championship game, Coeur d’Alene traveled to Twin Falls and routed the Bruins 55-13 on their home field.

“I believe that very few high school teams could have beaten us that day,” Cox wrote. “Mike played his heart out. He scored on a recovered fumble, he threw a touchdown pass to Don Leonard, and he ran the ball tough from the tailback position. He played tough at outside linebacker on defense, and he put every kickoff into the end zone.”

“After the game was over, I guess a lot of emotions that I had been holding in came out,” Cox wrote. “I was crying like a blubbering idiot.”

When the Vikings returned home to North Idaho, “I had never seen a welcome like we received when we got back to Coeur d’Alene the next day,” Cox wrote. “There were carloads of people waiting for us at the city limits. So we had a caravan around town that ended up at the high school, where we had a huge pep rally. What a welcome. What a way to end the season.

“I will never forget it.”

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.