Teacher of the game–longtime Central coach Walvoord passes away
PELLA—He journeyed to campus from Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin in 1950, served as a team captain, returned to Central College 12 years after graduating and left as the longest-tenured and winningest men’s basketball coach in school history.
Jack Walvoord ’54 passed away at a Sioux Falls, South Dakota hospital near his home early Friday evening, surrounded by family members, including his youngest daughter, Jane (Walvoord) Newman ’80. He was 92.
A memorial service will be held July 8 at 11 a.m. at First Church in Pella. Memorial gifts may be designated for the Jack Walvoord Endowed Scholarship Fund at Central College. His wife, Joan (Wassenaar) Walvoord ‘54 died in 2016 and his oldest daughter, Julie (Walvoord) Cohen ’77 died in April. He had six grandchildren.
A four-year letterwinner as Central’s point guard, Walvoord spent two years in the U.S. Army and played basketball for a military team at Fort Dix, New Jersey. He became a coach at Georgetown (Colo.) High School before spending eight years at Bellflower (Calif.) High School. His Bellflower teams qualified for the California Interscholastic Federation Tournament six times, reaching the semifinals five times and capturing the 1965 CIF state championship.
Walvoord succeeded his college coach, Marinus Kregel, at Central in 1966. He posted a 380-315 record over 29 seasons, the third-longest tenure of any Dutch head coach in any sport. His teams captured 10 Iowa Conference titles, including nine in his final 19 seasons, along with eight NCAA Division III tournament berths. He put up a combined high school/college record of 505-375. He was also Central’s baseball coach from 1966-67 and men’s cross country coach from 1966-73.
Walvoord was inducted into Central’s Athletics Hall of Honor in 2012.
His focus, however, was not the scoreboard. He was also an associate professor of physical education and saw himself as a teacher, with a classroom that featured hoops on each end. He preached the virtues of hustle, hard work, team play and relentless defense.
Playing the game the right way was essential, in Walvoord’s eyes, which typically turned first to the turnover column when scanning the box scores. Possession of the basketball was something to be treasured under Walvoord.
“He was old school,” said Tim Larsen ’89. “Practices were about fundamentals. “We rarely scrimmaged. We drilled and drilled and drilled. We’d work on game situations but rarely did we run up and down the court.”
He measured success in terms of effort and execution.
“The one thing that Coach Walvoord really taught me above all was that it’s not really who won or lost that’s most important, it was the game itself,” said Brad Wynja ‘94, following Walvoord’s retirement in 1995. “It’s not that he didn’t want to win, but you could tell if he felt good after a game about the way we played. If we won and didn’t play as well as we could have, a lot of people would say at least we won, but he’d be upset. And if we lost, but really played well, he could accept that.”
Harold De Bie ’65, played in high school in California for Walvoord, who urged him to attend Central, then coached him for his final two years in college. De Bie scored 1,310 points for what was then Central’s career scoring mark. They became close friends following De Bie’s graduation and often attended NCAA basketball tournaments together.
“He always had a good game plan,” De Bie said. “What Coach said, you just did, because that was the right thing to do.”
Yet Walvoord could adapt. He had a deep squad in 1990-91, but it featured five starters under 6-foot-5. To fans’ amazement, he installed what was then known as the Loyola Marymount (Calif.) offense, and the Dutch ran wild with full-court defensive pressure along with a quick-trigger offense. Central rang up 94.5 points a game en route to a conference crown and NCAA tourney berth.
“I’m not sure our offense was any different that year, but the tempo was,” Walvoord said. “We were running the same half-court offense, but we didn’t get into it very often. That style lent itself extremely well to the talent we had.”
Walvoord was a pioneer in seeking out travel opportunities for his players. The Dutch made four extended trips to Hawaii, but competed in Norway, Sweden, Spain, Germany, Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia and the Bahamas as well while also trekking around the U.S. Walvoord viewed the trips as vehicles for educating his players. There were few quick turnarounds. One trip to California and Hawaii extended 17 days.
“He was very competitive but he didn’t seem consumed by winning,” said Matt Melvin ’90, now serving as vice president of enrollment management at Penn State University. “Many teams who travel overseas try to play as many games as possible and practice on the off days. When we went to Spain and Hawaii, he made sure we saw more than just the basketball court.”
Laresen appreciates that even more years later.
“When we were in Hawaii, we played three games in almost two weeks and maybe practiced once,” he said. “He made sure it was about the experience.”
Helping bankroll those trips were profits from the team bratwurst stand Walvoord built for Pella’s Tulip Festival each May, a tradition the current squad still carries on. For more than 20 years, Walvoord journeyed home to Wisconsin, bringing back his favored style of bratwurst that was not available in Iowa. He donned old jeans, work gloves and a grimy cowboy hat, toiling tirelessly over the smoky coals for three days.
“The cowboy hat and gloves should go in the archives,” Melvin said.
Walvoord cherished practice time because it was devoted to teaching. But games left him grasping for antacid tablets. His language was strictly G-rated, yet uniquely colorful from the bench when moments of exasperation generated shouts of “Holy balls!” or “Hokey Pete!” He was respectful of game officials, yet never hesitant to provide feedback. In games at unfamiliar venues, he would sometimes check with the team’s traveling scorekeeper for the names of the game officials, so he could invoke them later with his critiques, as in “Those aren’t legal screens, Bob.”
And his description of any task or process on or off the court inevitably started with the same six words: “If we go to work and…” He used the phrase endlessly, much to his players’ amusement. He once told a player performing yard work at Walvoord’s home to “Go to work and take a break.” And for a team schedule poster in the late 1980s, the players posed in flannel shirts and safety helmets for a photo above the tartly worded headline, “Going to work.”
Yet for Larsen, who Walvoord insisted on calling “Timmy” even though no one else did, respect runs deep.
“I learned a lot of things, not just with X’s and O’s and drills, but in how he treated us,” Larsen said. “He truly cared for each and every one of us.”
The only things trumping Walvoord’s love for the game were his love for his faith, family and players. He thought the lessons basketball can provide were endless and are what he pointed to when asked what he wanted his players to take away from their time at Central.
“Respect and appreciation, I guess,” Walvoord said. “Respect for the game, respect for people, respect for the institution and the program. Also appreciation for the game and their teammates.
“It’s a good game. It provides a lot of excitement. Those who play it come to understand themselves a little better. Sometimes the people who don’t play as much learn more than the players who are stars. Those who have their dreams and goals challenged have to sit down and look at themselves. They come back with a greater resolve to meet the challenge.
“If there hasn’t been a challenge, then it hasn’t been a great experience.”
