THE FRONT ROW with MARK NELKE: Superstitions, relationships and more — longtime Lakeland girls basketball coach Seymour calls it a career

All those heads-up pennies lying around Lakeland High and elsewhere in Rathdrum — placed there by chance, or by design — will have to be picked up by somebody else now.

Steve Seymour, who made it a game-day ritual to look for the lucky pennies as he walked the halls — and anywhere else his feet took him before the game — has called it a career after 27 seasons as Lakeland High girls basketball coach.

“I just felt like … as cliche as it sounds, it was time for somebody else to give it a shot,” said Seymour, 56, who attributed his decision to “a combination of many things that have added up over the years.”

Seymour coached in more than 600 games at Lakeland, finishing with an overall record of 296-315. He took the Hawks to state 11 times, winning back-to-back state 3A titles in 2001 and ’02). Lakeland was also third in 3A in 2004.

Under Seymour, Lakeland won or shared six Intermountain League titles, won five 3A district championships and six 4A regional titles.

“Coaches say they do it to spend more time with their family,” Seymour said. “The two people home in my house, I’m not sure they’re crazy that I get to spend more time with them. This is the first time I haven’t had a coaching position in 35 years.”

Until recently, Seymour coached the high jumpers at Lakeland for 30-plus years, and the hurdlers for some 15 years.

“Seymour is obviously a very talented and well-respected coach,” said Deana Lange, Seymour’s assistant and junior varsity coach for each of those 27 seasons.

“His laid-back personality and dry sense of humor will for sure be missed — maybe not so much by some officials,” she added with a laugh.

“I have always been so impressed/jealous with how easy it was for him to identify other teams' offenses and defenses during a game and adjust on the fly,” Lange said. “He was also amazing with how he would prepare our teams for specific things in regards to our opponent. My favorite time of the year was district tournament time as he always came up with some sort of wrinkle offensively or defensively, making it fun to watch how teams so familiar to us would react.”

Seymour said he still plans to teach English for a few more years before he retires as an educator.

THE 1984 Coeur d’Alene High graduate played one season at receiver at Snow Junior College in Ephraim, Utah, then transferred to North Idaho College, where he was primarily a high jumper. He finished up at Linfield College in McMinnville, Ore., competing in the high jump there as well.

After graduation, Seymour married the former Marci Long and they moved to Klamath Falls, Ore. There, he taught for five years and was, at various times, an assistant coach in football, girls basketball and track and field.

In 1994, Seymour was hired as a teacher at Lakeland, where he was boys JV basketball coach for one season under Mike Bayley. When Lakeland girls coach Shelly (Layton) McLean resigned at the end of the season, Seymour was named the Hawks’ varsity girls coach.

Seymour said he “was pretty sure” heading into this season that it was going to be his last year as coach.

The Hawks won at Moscow in the first round of the 4A Region 1 tournament to advance to the best-of-3 championship series vs. Sandpoint. The Bulldogs beat Lakeland 2-0 to advance to state. The Hawks finished 8-11.

“I remember talking to the officials afterward (at Sandpoint), and basically saying ‘Hey, that was my last game,’” Seymour said. “They immediately started trying to recruit me to officiate.”

Seymour said he read a story about a shortage of officials in North Idaho and beyond, and it “made me think I should do something to give back — some sort of atonement, for all those years of questioning, barking, pleading,” he said. “I’ve always said I’d make a terrible official … some of those officials came to become great friends of mine. I’ll certainly miss them out there.

I don’t know if I can join them. … (but) I want to help in some capacity.”

ONE THING’S for sure — Lange, an assistant for one season under McLean for one season before Seymour took over, will not be his successor. She has maintained for years that when Seymour goes, she’s gone, too, and he said that stance hasn’t changed.

“I am not sure I am capable of summing up what 27 years of coaching with Steve has meant to this program and to me,” Lange said. “When we started out I had no clue what I was doing and had no idea that half of my life would be spent as part of Lady Hawk basketball. I am so proud of the program we have built and the kids that have been part of it. Because he is much older than me — hah! — he had coaching and teaching experience prior to starting here. I learned so much from Seymour about coaching basketball, but more importantly, how to relate to kids.

“Not many people understand how much he cares about his players, how he advocates for them and stays in touch with them years after they graduate," she added. "We have been lucky to have several former players come back to be on our staff (including, most recently, Sarah Hansen Nave and Micki DesMarais Darnell, both from the state title teams), and that is 100% due to the relationship they had with Seymour while playing for him.”

Seymour said he enjoyed the occasional phone conversations with Sandpoint’s head coaches, including Duane Ward, even after he retired four years ago, and his assistant and eventual replacement, Will Love — which might seem a little odd when you consider Lakeland and Sandpoint have been the two teams battling for the lone berth to state from North Idaho most of the time in recent years.

“Steve Seymour was one of my favorite coaches,” said Ward, who coached against Seymour in two stints as Sandpoint High girls basketball coach, most recently in 2018, but as far back as 1995-96, Seymour’s first season. “He married the daughter of one of my wife’s best friends.

“He was a tremendous coach,” Ward added. “I told him, 'Your kids always work extremely hard, they always try to do what you tell them to do, and they’re very, very good sports.’

“I also told him one time, ‘You know, Steve, there’s nobody I’d rather lose to than you. But, nobody I’d rather beat than you.’”

BACK TO those pennies.

“I always have been someone who shuffles along, head down, mumbling, and you see all kinds of things when you walk with your head down,” Seymour said. “And after a while they came to be good luck.

“At some point, after I complained about the fact I hadn’t found a heads-up penny, maybe she (Lange) started planting them just to make sure I would find one throughout the day … and I’ve picked them up in some god-awful places. In the scummiest part of the supermarket parking lot, under a quarter inch of slush and snow and spit and whatever and mud. You can see the head and you go, that’s the first heads-up penny I’ve seen; I can’t pass it up.”

“I am not going to totally admit to doing that but I was always very aware of his random superstitions and may have played into them a little bit,” Lange said.

Seymour said the search for heads-up pennies was born out of “desperation,” perhaps caused by a string of losses early in his career.

“You talk to a coach long enough and they truly believe in good luck, karma, and then the next season they put no faith in any of it,” he said. “You pick up heads-up pennies, or you walk on only the squares in the linoleum entryway at Lakeland that are colored squares, and it looks pretty weird; people think you walk strange on game days.

“You convince yourself there’s nothing to this notion of luck, that it’s about preparation and talent and players — and you short-arm a wadded-up piece of paper toward the garbage can, and in your mind you still can’t help yourself but say ‘If this goes in, then we win.’ And it comes up short and you break out in a cold sweat and you go ‘Dog-gone it, why didn’t I just walk it over and drop it in there.’”

Seymour had other superstitions, but you get the drift.

“Early on in our career, his superstitions and belief in karma were next level,” Lange said. “Things like heads-up pennies, wearing the same dress shirt and tie for specific games and little green Army man figurines were a staple. I may have even joined in with buying the same type of gum, bus snacks or wearing specific outfits for district and state tournament games. Those are for sure memories that still make me laugh.”

LUCKY PENNIES and little green Army man figurines aside, Seymour impacted the Lakeland girls basketball program in many other ways.

“The biggest thing Lakeland will miss is the emphasis Seymour put on kids being high-character, hard-working and respectful young ladies,” Lange said. “Obviously we have been lucky with the type of kids in our program, but they also learned the importance of those qualities from him.

"My hope is that the future staff will work as hard as we have to maintain a program that stresses those qualities.”

Seymour, in true Lakeland fashion — and perhaps true Seymour fashion — naturally deflects any credit sent his way.

“This has been a collaborative effort in terms of what this program was, became, is,” Seymour said. “It wasn’t just one person sitting on the end of the bench, or blowing the whistle at practice. This was as much a vision on the part of Deana Lange as it was for anyone else on the coaching staff. She did a tremendous job in terms of getting kids to get their stuff in and be on time and do the work and be fundamentally sound … It’s me who is resigning, but the work that went into the program goes beyond that.”

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.