(Avoca) Frank Nelsen’s coaching journey has taken him around the block a time or two. In speaking with him it sounds like he’s enjoyed every second of it. The longtime AHST girls basketball coach joins the Why I Coach series.
To say he lives for coaching might be an understatement. He’s coached many sports at the high school level, but basketball has been his forte. Nelsen was at Walnut in the late 70’s and moved to Avoca in the early 80’s where he coached up until his retirement about ten years ago. Watching Guthrie Center and Karen McCool at the state tournament in the early 1960’s got him hooked. “I don’t know why, but I just sat there and said, ‘That’s just such a good game, I have to get into that.'”
Nelsen grew up for the most part in Colorado, but is a 1967 Audubon High School graduate. He spent time coaching in North Dakota and Minnesota, but the bulk of his career took place in Southwest Iowa. He elevated nearly every program he touched to great heights. He enjoyed, “Watching kids improve and getting better all the time and not being afraid of hard work. They just continually worked and they’d get better and all of a sudden they wanted to be even better. It was just fun. They made it fun. They made my life so fast I don’t even know where in the heck time went.”
His teams were known for their three-point shooting and he liked to change up drills quickly so practices didn’t feel like a marathon. “You want to change your drills up bing-da-bang-da-boom. Make them think. Make it like a game.”
Nelsen coached Mitch Osborn in high school at Walnut and could tell the confident young man was on his way to big things. Osborn has gone on to win over 700 games as a high school boys basketball coach. “When I was at Walnut I coached both boys and girls at the same time. It got to the point where that was really, really difficult to do. It’s kind of funny, but I really wanted to coach the girls and then Mitch Osborn said to me that I always told them when you start something you have to finish it. He says ‘You started with the boys, you didn’t start with the girls so you finish it!’ He was a leader back then too. He was a good one then and still is. He’s not a good one, he’s a great one. I learned an awful lot from that kid. That guy works so hard and is going 100 miles per hour both ways.”
Osborn’s dad Jack was a key figure in bringing Nelsen back to the area. Now that the coaching responsibilities have slowed down for Nelsen there’s not much of anything more thrilling than having a former athlete come to his his house and share stories in the memory room which holds all the old trophies. To this day he still helps with the youth program in Avoca. One of Nelsen’s first coaching endeavors was at his alma mater, Mayville State College, where he was an assistant football coach. One of his players was drafted by the Buffalo Bills.
Previous Coaches
John Kesselring, Adair-Casey alum
Eric Maassen, (AHST grad) Sheldon
Jerome Hoegh, Atlantic grad (West Sioux)
Gaylord Schelling, Atlantic and Tri-Center
Chad Klein, Audubon Native (Kuemper Catholic and Boone)
Trevor Gipple, (Griswold grad) SW Valley
Eric Stein (Harlan grad) Iowa Central
Darrell Burmeister, Nodaway Valley
Lanny Kliefoth, Nodaway Valley
Chad Harder, (Walnut Grad) Tri-Center
Kevin Suhr, (Walnut Grad) Blue Valley High School, KS
