The Sacred Acre

by Mark Tabb

  THE

  SACRED

  ACRE

  The

  Ed Thomas

  Story

  MARK TABB

  with

  THE ED THOMAS FAMILY

  I want my legacy to be

  that I wasn’t just a football coach,

  but a man who tried to live a Christian life

  and impact others.

  ED THOMAS

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  FOREWORD BY TONY DUNGY

  A NOTE FROM THE ED THOMAS FAMILY

  INTRODUCTION: THE SACRED ACRE

  CHAPTER 1: EF5

  CHAPTER 2: NO PLACE LIKE HOME

  CHAPTER 3: A STORM OF DOUBT

  CHAPTER 4: “WE WILL REBUILD”

  CHAPTER 5: STARTING OVER

  CHAPTER 6: UNPARALLELED OPPORTUNITY

  CHAPTER 7: “YOU WOULD DO THE SAME THING FOR ME”

  CHAPTER 8: AFTER THE CAMERAS DISAPPEAR

  CHAPTER 9: HALFTIME

  CHAPTER 10: A SUMMER OF CHANGE

  CHAPTER 11: FIRST GLIMPSE OF NORMALCY

  CHAPTER 12: MORE THAN A GAME

  CHAPTER 13: THE FINAL SEASON

  CHAPTER 14: THE FIRST FAMILY VACATION (EVER)

  CHAPTER 15: AN ORDINARY DAY

  CHAPTER 16: THE UNTHINKABLE, JUNE 24,2009

  CHAPTER 17: A NIGHTMARE UNFOLDS

  CHAPTER 18: GRIEF AND GRACE

  CHAPTER 19: THE HARDEST PART

  CHAPTER 20: GOOD-BYE

  EPILOGUE: GETTING UP, MOVING FORWARD

  APPENDIX 1: TEAM ROSTERS

  APPENDIX 2: COACHES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Share Your Thoughts

  FOREWORD BY TONY DUNGY

  I FIRST HEARD ABOUT COACH ED THOMAS IN 2005. OUR team, the Indianapolis Colts, won its first thirteen games that year and finished 14 and 2, and I was named National Football League Coach of the Year by a number of organizations. That same season, Ed Thomas was named High School Coach of the Year by the NFL. Ed coached at Aplington-Parkersburg High in Parkersburg, Iowa, and over the course of thirty-four years led them to a record of 292 and 84 and two state championships. That is a tremendous accomplishment in itself, but even more remarkable is the fact that from this town of 2,000 people, Ed sent four players to the NFL.

  But that’s not why Ed Thomas was selected Coach of the Year in 2005. He was selected because of the impact he had on every young man who played for him. Coach Thomas was an inspiration, a role model to each one of them. Not just the ones who would go on to play college or professional football, but to every single boy who played for him. In this small town, one Sacred Acre was dedicated to the raising and building of young men—and not just to be champions on the field. Yes, that was important. But Ed knew that what happens on Friday night is very much related to what happens on the other nights of the week. He aimed to coach the whole player: body, mind, soul, and spirit. And it didn’t matter if you were a star player or a third-stringer. Everybody was important. No young man was ever a waste of time.

  I believe in those things as well, and I tried to coach the same way. However, I believe that Ed Thomas, doing it at the high school level, had an impact that most professional coaches could never have. A professional coach may get more notoriety, but Coach Thomas didn’t just teach the players. He taught the rest of the student body, the faculty and staff, and the parents. He impacted a whole town, and he did it for three generations. In a sport where toughness is valued and coaches are evaluated by their wins and losses, Ed never bought into that value system. Teaching these boys how to become real men was how he always viewed his job.

  Ed Thomas was a man who lived the gospel, loved his family, and believed in doing things the right way. He taught his players that there are no shortcuts and that you will ultimately be judged, not by what you did, but on how you did it. He was loved, not just by the people of Parkersburg, but by a nation. So when I heard the news on June 24, 2009, that Ed had been tragically taken from us, my reaction was like that of many others. Shock turned to grief in knowing that my profession had lost one of the truly great men to ever step onto a football field. I was honored to be able to place a phone call to his family and express my condolences. Now, as I have gotten to know his wife and children and been able to speak with some of his former players, my admiration for him has deepened even further.

  I never had the privilege of meeting Ed Thomas personally, but I felt like I knew him through some of the men who played for him. The Bible says in Matthew 7:16 that a tree is known by its fruit, and through these players, I have seen the fruit of Ed’s life. His heart, his faith, and his Christian character are evident in so many of them. He was a master seed planter who worked hard to till the soil of his Sacred Acre. I believe that reading this book will give you a better understanding of this special man and the example he left for all of us to follow.

  A NOTE FROM THE ED THOMAS FAMILY

  MY HUSBAND ALWAYS ENCOURAGED HIS PLAYERS TO “PLAY four quarters!” In other words, to play with heart, with enthusiasm, to never quit, to never stop being your best. You see, football was more than just Xs and Os to Ed. He often said that if all he taught his boys was how to play football, then he would have failed as a coach. “I want them to learn the intangibles that will make them a better husband, dad, member of their community and church.” Faith, family, and football. It’s on every helmet.

  Ed loved the game of football, of course. And he loved his players. And they won more than 80 percent of their games. But that’s not why those boys loved Ed; that’s not what changed the course of their lives off the field. Ed’s greatest legacy was leading by example. A close friend said it best: “True toughness is doing what’s right all the time, and Ed was the toughest guy I knew.” The core values of his faith — honesty, integrity, respect, honor, doing what is right — these are the life-changing intangibles those boys caught from Ed more than any footballs.

  Now, Ed wasn’t perfect, and he would be the first to grin a bit sheepishly and agree. But there can be no question that his passion guided those boys, inspired them, showed them the way to become men. “Play four quarters,” Ed would scream over the din of the crowd, and those boys would hear it and give it all they had. That’s leadership—not for glory, not for self, but for love of another who gave his all for them.

  Ed didn’t draw attention to himself, and he would be embarrassed to see that a book has been written about him. But my sons and I hope that by sharing this humble man’s story, you will be inspired to find your own passion

  to use the gifts that God has given you,

  to do what’s right,

  to lead by example.

  And then to get out there and “play all four quarters!” Ed is counting on you. So are your kids, your spouse, the people you work with.

  We miss you, Ed. The boys are good. You left an example to follow.

  All our love,

  INTRODUCTION

  THE SACRED ACRE

  Take care of the little things, and the big things will take care of themselves.

  ED THOMAS

  EVERYONE IN PARKERSBURG AND BEYOND REFERRED TO THE home football field of Aplington-Parkersburg High School as “the Sacred Acre” — everyone, that is, except the team’s head coach. Ed Thomas referred to it as “the field where my team plays.” While technically correct, his perspective doesn’t tell the whole story. The A-P Falcons played on the field next to the high school, a field flanked on either side by metal bleachers like those you will find at any small high school anywhere in the country, especially in the Midwest. And only the A-P Falcon football team played on the field next to the school. The football field ma
y have been school property, but the school didn’t get to use it. No one but the football team was allowed to set foot on it. Coach Thomas let the band perform their halftime shows on the field, but he did not let them practice on it during the week. Nor did he let A-P’s gym classes play soccer or rugby or even tag on the field. In the spring, when the track team used the track that circled the field, Ed roped off the football playing surface to keep sprinters and distance runners from stretching or warming up inside the white lines where only the football team was allowed to stretch and warm up. Only on the rarest of occasions did he let his team practice on their home field through the week. Practice was held on the field on the opposite side of Johnson Street, across from the high school.

  If Ed seemed a little obsessive about his football field, there was a good reason for it. He was a lot obsessive about his football field. He took better care of it than his own lawn. On the few occasions when his wife, Jan, could talk him into mowing the yard, he shot around it with the mower like a teenage boy listening to heavy metal music surrounded by pretty girls. He missed wide patches of grass on one side of the house and scalped it down to dirt on the other. When he finished, Jan would walk outside and shake her head. “Really, Ed,” she would say, “that’s the best you can do?”

  “What?” he said with that little smirk of his that always put a smile on Jan’s face. “It looks good enough to me.”

  “If that’s the case, then I better make you an appointment with the eye doctor,” Jan quipped.

  “Well, a couple of spots may not look so great, but that’s because the lawn mower blade is dull. I’ll take care of that later.”

  “Yeah, right,” Jan said, amused. The thought of her husband sharpening the blade on their lawn mower struck her as absurd. Ed Thomas was many things, but handy was not one of them.

  As soon as Ed left the house, Jan went outside and redid the lawn herself to make it less of an eyesore.

  The football field was another story entirely. Ed meticulously went over it like Michelangelo putting the finishing touches on the statue of David. From early spring to late fall Ed mowed it twice a week (“to promote growth,” he said), making sure to mow in the same direction between the yard lines. That way the grass had the distinctive contrasting shades of green every five yards, like the college and professional fields. He also watered and fertilized and aerated and overseeded and applied weed killers and bug killers, whether the field needed them or not. When it rained, he drove over to make sure the water drained properly, and in the hot summer months when rain rarely fell, he set out sprinklers and watered it himself until the school finally installed an irrigation system. All in all, he babied the field as if it sat in the middle of the University of Iowa’s Kinnick Stadium, not between metal bleachers in the middle of a small town in northeast Iowa. Most people said that the field at Kinnick Stadium was the only field in the state of Iowa that compared to A-P’s. The university employed a staff of professional groundskeepers; A-P only had Ed Thomas, but that was enough.

  Ed’s passion for the field where his team played football started at an early age. Long before Parkersburg High School hired him to coach and teach government and economics, back when Ed was in junior high school, he pulled the neighborhood kids together to play pickup football games in the large yard in front of his grandmother’s house. This was no ordinary yard. He found a couple of bags of lime that he used to mark off yard lines and end zones. It only seemed natural for him to keep right on caring for his field himself when he became a football coach right out of college.

  When Ed arrived in Parkersburg in 1975 after three years at Northeast Hamilton High School in Blairsburg, Iowa, he immediately took ownership of the field. He mowed it during the off-season, and sprayed the weeds that sprung up in the gravel separating the field from the running track. Before long he found himself attacking the weeds that grew up around the forty yard line. That’s when he noticed the grass wasn’t quite as green as he wanted it to be, which led to a round of fertilizer applied to the field himself. And then he said the yard lines weren’t chalked off to his liking, so he started doing that himself, along with putting down the numbers.

  Sometime in the late 1970s or 80s, Ed found a secondhand watering system that he bought with his own money —an odd menagerie of copper pipes that had to be manually connected to a fire hydrant on the edge of the high school parking lot. The pipes only covered half of the field, which meant Ed had to come back at a later time and move them from one end to the other. The job was too big for one man to do by himself, so Ed enlisted Jan to help. When their two sons were big enough to lift and carry the pipes, they took their mother’s place.

  Ed was the kind of guy who had a schedule for everything connected with his football program, and watering the field was no different. Nothing got in the way of his timetable, not even his own absence. Not long after he purchased the secondhand watering system, he and one of his assistant coaches, Al Kerns, had to go to a coaching clinic in Cedar Falls. Ed called one of his buddies, Jim Graves, and asked him to take care of the field for him. “I’ll start the water before I leave,” Ed told him, “but I’ll need you to come over and turn it off for me at 10:30 p.m. sharp. I’ll leave a key to the fire hydrant for you at my house.”

  “Sure, Ed,” Jim said, “I’ll take care of it.”

  A little before 10:30, Jim walked out to his car to head over to the field. He could see the high school parking lot from his house, and he noticed a police car and a city water department truck already there. Jim rushed over, parked his pickup truck, and walked over to the fire hydrant off to the side of the field. “Hey, guys,” he said to the policeman and the city worker standing next to the hydrant, “is there a problem?”

  The city worker looked up. “The low pressure alarm went off on the water tower. I traced the problem to the field here. I need to shut the sprinklers off, but the hydrant is locked and I don’t have a key. Do you know what the coach did with it?”

  “I’ve got the key in my truck,” Jim said.

  The policeman and city worker looked at each other and smiled as if to say, “Great. Finally.” “So will you shut it off for us?” the policeman asked.

  Jim glanced at his watch. “Well, Coach told me not to shut it off until 10:30, and it ain’t 10:30 yet.”

  “OK, we can wait,” the policeman said without arguing the point. A few minutes later Jim turned the water off—at precisely 10:30.

  Later that night, when Ed returned home, Jim called and said,

  “I want you to know that there were a lot of people in town taking showers tonight who didn’t get rinsed off because your Sacred Acre needed water.” Ed laughed, but for Jim, the name stuck.

  Jim and Ed and several other locals got together most mornings to drink coffee at the local feed store. One morning, Ed talked Jim into replacing the lights on the football field. Jim worked for the local power company. When it came to Ed Thomas, it didn’t take much persuasion to talk Jim into it. “Sure,” he told Ed, “whatever you need.”

  “Now when you get out there with your equipment and start digging holes for the new poles, make sure you keep them away from the field. That kind of equipment can put ruts in the turf, you know,” Ed said to Jim.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “And when you cut the trench between the poles to bury the electrical lines, make sure you keep the trencher off the field. I don’t want anyone trampling down the grass.”

  “Don’t worry, Ed. I won’t touch your Sacred Acre.” The rest of the guys in the group howled with laughter.

  After that, the name spread. Every morning, someone managed to make some sort of comment about Ed’s Sacred Acre. One day it was Delbert Huisman — everyone called him Stub—who said, “Hey, Eddie. Drove by your Sacred Acre today. I could have sworn I saw a dandelion popping up around the fifty yard line. You better get out there and pull it up. You know how dandelions spread.” Another day it was Willie Vanderholt, who owned the local feed store where the
y met for coffee, who chimed in, “I heard there were some kids out last night running up and down your Sacred Acre. You better check to make sure the lock is still on the gate.” Everyone laughed and laughed with each comment, including Ed. However, after they finished their coffee, Ed went down to the high school and took a look around his field to make sure no dandelions had invaded and that the lock was still firmly in place on the gate. More than once, he discovered dandelions spread out across the field. They hadn’t grown up overnight. His coffee-drinking buddies had put them there as a joke.

  Ed never minded his friends’ razzing because he knew his obsession with the field was not about a 360- by 160-foot plot of grass. His Sacred Acre served as a symbol of a much larger lesson he wanted to convey to the young men who signed up to play football for him. Prior to his arrival, Parkersburg High School had only fielded three winning teams since it started football in 1958. In thirty-four seasons under Ed Thomas, they only had one losing season. Along the way, Ed compiled 292 victories, along with two state championships, four state runners-up, and nineteen play-off appearances. Every season, Ed preached the same life lessons of hard work, focus, commitment, and attention to the smallest detail. “If we do the little things right,” he told his teams, “the big things will take care of themselves.” One glance over at the football field made it clear that Coach Thomas practiced what he preached.

  The A-P football field also showed one of Ed’s greatest gifts, a gift that endeared him to people in a way not even he fully understood. Back when Parkersburg High School (before the consolidation with Aplington) was built in 1970, athletic fields were an afterthought. Bulldozers moved dirt from the north side of the building site to level the pad where the school was built, leaving behind a flat spot that consisted of rock and hard clay. Later they brought in some topsoil, spread it on top of that flat spot, and declared it the football field. Getting any kind of grass to grow on the hard clay had never been easy. But Ed was not going to settle for merely getting grass to grow. He wanted an exceptional field, and he saw no reason why this patch of clay and rock couldn’t be just that. He saw potential in a throwaway plot of ground that no one else could see. Through the years, he coaxed more out of that ground than anyone ever thought possible. He did the same thing with every player who came out for his team.