VAN WERT – Coaching wasn’t the only field Dave Froelich considered venturing into when he was in college.
While teaching and coaching probably always was the first option, the former Van Wert High School boys basketball coach also investigated another possibility before his senior year of college when he did an internship with DeKalb Ag Research, an agricultural company for which his dad was a district manager.
Coaching won out, though, and after 420 wins in 30 seasons as a head coach, Froelich is one of four inductees into the Ohio High School Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame this year.
The majority of those wins came in 21 seasons at Van Wert, where his teams were 279-188 and won three Western Buckeye League championships and two district championships. In nine seasons at Colonel Crawford, his teams were 141-61 and he was an assistant coach for four years at Perrysburg.
Froelich is one of four coaches going into the OHSBCA Hall of Fame in April, along with Pickerington North girls coach Dave Butcher, retired Pickerington North boys coach Pete Liptrap and retired Kenton Ridge girls coach Ed Foulk.
“I knew for a long time. It was a pretty easy decision for me as I went through college,” Froelich said about getting into coaching.
His first season at Van Wert was 1992-93. He retired in 2013 and is now assistant principal at Van Wert High School.
“There are parts I’ll always miss but it was the right decision for me based on a lot of circumstances. When I was getting toward the end I would ask different guys and they’d say, ‘You’ll know.’ That never made sense to me unti it did. I just knew,” he said.
“I miss practice, I miss the relationships with guys that you have in a locker room setting or an off the court setting that you can’t duplicate. But I also found out there were other things happening that I didn’t think existed in this world on a Saturday night in January.”
Froelich played two years of varsity basketball at Van Wert, where he graduated in 1975, and averaged 14.1 points a game as a senior on a team that had a 13-9 record. After high school, he played basketball at Alma College, where he lettered four years and was a captain for two years.
“I had good influences from Frank Minnig as my high school coach and from my college coach. My biggest influence from a coaching standpoint, just blind luck I guess, was I got hired at Perrysburg as an assistant and Larry Clark was the head coach.
“He was at Lincolnview for a long time and then had a great career at Perrysburg. I was his varsity assistant for four years. I thought, ‘Oh, I played, I know how to do things.’ But I didn’t. He was awesome, he gave me a lot of responsibility and taught me everything we did and how to do it. I was very fortunate to go to work for him before I ventured out on my own,” Froelich said.
.neFileBlock {
margin-bottom: 20px;
}
.neFileBlock p {
margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
}
.neFileBlock .neFile {
border-bottom: 1px dotted #aaa;
padding-bottom: 5px;
padding-top: 10px;
}
.neFileBlock .neCaption {
font-size: 85%;
}
