Terry Stotts, the head coach of the Portland Trailblazers, has his team in the National Basketball Association playoffs and is in the conversation for Coach of the Year in the NBA.

What does this have to do with us, you ask?

Terry lists his hometown as Cedar Falls, but the story for us is better than that.

Terry Stotts’ father, Frank Stotts, was a resident of Le Grand who played basketball for Marshalltown Junior College in the early 1950s.

I know this because the late Bob Hayes, noted Marshalltown sportswriter, golfer and raconteur, told me so a few years ago and I wrote a column about Stotts.

Seeing that Terry Stotts has achieved new success in the coaching ranks of professional basketball, I was reminded again of the stories Hayes told.

Frank Stotts played on an Marshalltown Junior College cage team that included Hayes, Woody Harvey, Louie Walkup, Dick Endicott, Lee Ehrends, Don Gordon and Hall of Fame golf writer Larry Dennis and was coached by Leonard Cole. He was a year late to play on the 1953 state championship junior college team but did play on the MJC team that finished fourth in the 1953 Iowa AAU tournament held in Marshalltown each year.

Frank Stotts then went on to Iowa State Teachers College (now UNI), breaking scoring records and fathering a son who became an all-Big 8 first team selection at Oklahoma as a senior after four seasons as a starter for the Sooners.

Terry, chosen by Houston in the second round of the NBA draft, instead played professional basketball for a few seasons in Europe before returning to the U. S. to play for George Karl’s Montana Nuggets. He then joined Karl as an assistant coach for 10 years, six with Seattle and four with Milwaukee. He has twice before been an NBA head coach, two years each with Atlanta and Milwaukee.

The story for us is about Frank Stotts who, after playing became a coach in the Midwest and at the University of Guam.

Bob Hayes said he thought he remembered that Frank scored 100 points one time when he was in the Army in Okinawa.

According to an article about son Terry in the Portland Oregonian, Stotts says “basketball has been my life. I was an assistant ball [for my dad], going to practices of the Marshfield (Wis.) Tigers. I wore a black blazer with a tiger patch on my chest.”

His dad, Terry says, was of a different makeup than his son.

“We’re both passionate about the game,” Terry told the Oregonian, “but my dad was a dynamic, fiery kind of coach. He wore his emotions on his sleeve.”

I wonder if Frank Stotts ever told his son about his days at Marshalltown Junior College. One colorful memory of Bob Hayes is going to MJC when it was at what is now Miller Middle School.

“We had a 10 a.m. break in classes and made a beeline for the 13th Street Inn to get ‘fortified’ for the rest of the morning. It was a very short trip from Miller to the watering hole,” he remembered.

No word about whether Frank Stotts was part of the group headed for the oasis each day. If he was, it didn’t affect his shooting on the basketball court. Frank was the second-leading scorer on his team, averaging 14.7 points per game, trailing Louie Walkup’s 20.5 ppg.

So, if you are looking for an NBA team to root for, think of the one with the Marshalltown connection, the Portland Trailblazers.

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Rick Deines resides in Marshalltown.