THE FRONT ROW with MARK NELKE: Duane Ward's best move: Staying put in Sandpoint

Why would someone stay in the same area for more than half a century, serving his alma mater and his community in a variety of ways — as a coach and as an administrator.

Duane Ward said there was two reasons — one of which is pretty obvious if you’ve spent any time at all in the Sandpoint area.

If you know, you know.

The other reason?

“During my 12 years of school, my family and I moved 13 times,” Ward recalled Friday night, shortly before the Sandpoint High grad and later longtime coach and, for a few years, athletic director, was inducted into the North Idaho Athletic Hall of Fame at The Coeur d’Alene Resort.

“I went to the first grade in Billings, Mont., the second grade in Minnesota, the third grade back in Billings. In between there I lived in Dayton, Mont., then I went to Columbia Falls, Mont., for four years, then over to Noxon, Mont., then we moved to Hope.

“And so I decided I’d had enough moving, and I wasn’t going to move any more.”

DUANE’S FATHER was a construction worker, working on dams. The family ended up in Hope when his dad was working on the Noxon dam.

“And during that process of moving all the time, I saw what it did to us kids,” said Duane, the third of five children — with two older brothers, a younger brother and lastly, a sister. “Trying to make new friends … it wasn’t good.

“Neither of those two finished high school, because of all the moving,” Duane said of his younger siblings. “So I made up my mind I was going to stay in one place.”

Settling in Hope was the beginning of some stability in the family.

The Ward family moved to North Idaho in 1956. Duane attended Hope Elementary in the eighth grade, then attended the Ninth Grade Center in Sandpoint the next year, then was at Sandpoint High (which is now Sandpoint Middle School) in grades 10-12, graduating in 1961.

“WOODY” WARD lettered in football, basketball and track at Sandpoint High, then played basketball at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston.

He began his teaching and coaching career at Sandpoint High in 1966. At various times during his tenure, he was head boys basketball coach, head girls basketball coach (for two stints each), and an assistant in football, track and field and cross country.

Ward was athletic director at SHS for a time in the 1980s. He retired as a teacher in 1999, and from coaching in 2021.

He coached the Sandpoint boys for a stint in the 1970s and another in the 1980s. He was girls coach for a few seasons in the mid-1990s, guiding the Bulldogs to the state championship game in 1996. In his second stint as girls coach, he led Sandpoint to state four straight seasons (2015-18).

After his first stint as girls coach, Ward coached basketball at the middle school level — mostly girls — for years.

“Even when I took a few years off, and was in the wood products business, I still kept coaching,” he recalled. “I was coaching little kids, and I was coaching freshman teams, coached sophomore teams. I was an assistant to Bill Adams, I was an assistant to Al Jacobson … even when I wasn’t teaching, I was still coaching.”

He took the Bulldog boys to state in 1970. As girls coach, he helped Sandpoint bring home one second-place and two third-place trophies.

In fact, he was at Sandpoint High watching a Bulldog girls basketball game this past season when he got the word he was being inducted into the North Idaho Athletic Hall of Fame.

John Knowles, a longtime Sandpoint assistant football coach and a Hall of Fame board member, saw Woody in the stands, and came over and gave him the good news.

“I was shocked, and very excited, and actually a little bit nervous about it; a little apprehensive,” Ward recalled. “Then I thought, ‘Why am I selected to go into it?’ Then I thought of all the years that I’ve been around there, and I thought, ‘Well, this is one of the things that happens to you when you stay in the same place, doing the same thing, for a long period of time.’

“I was ecstatic when I thought about it. What a tremendous honor — the highest honor that I’ve received in the line of athletics.”

JIM WILUND was principal at Sandpoint High from 1984-88, when he took a similar position at Lewiston High.

His first year at Sandpoint, Wilund hired Ward as athletic director, replacing longtime SHS AD Ken Beaudoin.

Wilund, who passed away in December 2020, was also inducted into the North Idaho Athletic Hall of Fame on Friday night, joining Ward in a class of five.

Ward’s first recollection of Wilund was when Woody was coaching the junior varsity boys at Sandpoint High in the mid-1960s, and Wilund was playing basketball at Coeur d’Alene High.

He remembered being on the bench with head coach Pat Kaufman when the Bulldogs faced the Vikings, who were coached by Elmer Jordan.

“Elmer ran that Drake shuffle offense,” Ward recalled. “The point guard would pass the ball to the wing, and then he’d cut down and set a down screen in the corner for the low guy, and that would be Jim a lot of the time, and Jim would come up off that down screen … and he’d come off to the free-throw line, catch the ball and shoot a jump shot. And he was just killing us. I have such a vivid memory of that, I can see it right now.”

Wilund was a teacher, coach and principal in North Idaho for 33 years, retiring from Lewiston High in 2005.

He played football at Idaho, then taught and coached football at Timberline, Post Falls and St. Maries high schools.

He reffed high school and college basketball, and was also a baseball umpire.

His time as principal at Sandpoint High was relatively short, but memorable nonetheless.

“He was great,” Ward recalled. “He was very businesslike, but also very easy going. He was fun to be around. I remember we spent an entire day hunting — I took him hunting up on the High Drive. We had a great time.

“The only time he got a little upset with me was, when I made a pot of coffee in the athletic office and he didn’t like the way it tasted … too strong for him.”

STRONG COFFEE aside, Duane “Woody” Ward served his alma mater and the Sandpoint community well for more than half a century.

Meanwhile, back to the first reason Ward stayed in the Sandpoint area all these years?

“I had a passion for sports, especially for basketball, since I was really young,” Ward said. “Sports impacted me so much that I wanted to give something back. And I thought, what better way than to work with the young people of the Sandpoint community. My wife (Marilyn) was from here, you've got a beautiful lake, the ski hill, our kids (Paul, Jeff and Natalie) stayed here. So there was really no reason to leave.”

Nope, no reason at all.

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 208-664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on Twitter @CdAPressSports.