Great article in the Athletic. If you don't subscribe to this publication you are missing out. They do great work. Do you remember this from the news 10 years ago?
Ten years after his shooting death, football coach Ed Thomas still binds his Iowa community
By Scott Dochterman (The Athletic)
Mourners from near and far have come to a high school football stadium in Iowa on a steamy June evening in 2009. They surround the field, circle the fence and pile into metal bleachers, seats that weren’t even here a year ago. An EF5 tornado tore through Parkersburg, leveling nearly half the town, including the home grandstand. The crowd is here to honor Ed Thomas, a man whom most have met and whom all revere, the man who spent the past year leading Parkersburg’s revival, the man whose name graces this field.
Ed Thomas Field, home of the Aplington-Parkersburg Falcons, is known throughout northern Iowa as “The Sacred Acre.” And despite the football heroics of Thomas, grief fills this hallowed place as the community stands vigil only hours after Thomas’ death. Just 50 yards from the ticket booth, in a bus barn turned weight room, police tape cordons off the crime scene.
Pastors speak of forgiveness and compassion, peace and love; the same tenets the man everyone called coach. Walking among the crowd, town barber Tom Teeple can’t take more than a few steps without a hug. As he moves past familiar faces, Teeple approaches a distraught woman whom he has never seen. He stops and asks her if she knew coach Thomas. She tells him how she drove three hours that night to honor the man for patiently working with her son at a football camp and for helping her boy turn his life around.
Everyone has a story.
Al Kerns, Thomas’ assistant coach for 31 years and one of his best friends, will recall 10 years later how the night’s events have all blurred together. “I can’t tell you how many people came up to say, ‘Coach, I never met him, but he wrote me a letter.’ High school kids or people he’d find out about, maybe they had done something outstanding, or had overcome adversity. And he would write them a letter.”
It seems every resident in Butler County is here, each talking about coach Thomas. It’s unconscionable that he’s gone.
On the morning of June 24, 2009, former Aplington-Parkersburg player Mark Becker, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, walked into the bus barn and, in front of more than 20 athletes, inexplicably shot Thomas multiple times in the head. He was 58.
A decade removed from Thomas’ death, calm fills The Sacred Acre. The grass glimmers in the sun, as immaculate as when Thomas trimmed it to perfection. The rows align from north to south, save for a small patch of clover just beyond the east goalpost. A dented and weathered “Falcon Country” sign perches high beyond the west end zone. The battered sign withstood the violent wind.
The community took two fists to the face — one from nature, one from man — yet remains intact. Parkersburg has actually grown by 100 residents to nearly 2,000 since Thomas’s passing. The town’s resiliency is apparent from the new neighborhoods springing up on the south side to the full storefronts downtown.
“I think he’d be kind of proud of us,” Teeple says from his barbershop on Third Street. His mind, as it often does, falls back to the early ’70s, to the first time he met coach Thomas.
The town of What Cheer lies both in the middle of everywhere and nowhere in rural Iowa; not considered east, south or central. Too small (646 residents) to have its own high school, What Cheer’s only memorable feature is its name.
What Cheer is one of a handful of towns that make up Tri-County High School. Thomas graduated from there in 1968 before playing football at William Penn College in nearby Oskaloosa. Thomas was back home when he ran into a stranger at a service station.
“He had hair down to here,” says Teeple, pointing to his shoulder. “Wire-rimmed glasses and bell-bottomed pants. He said, ‘Who are you?’ I told him, ‘I’m the new barber in town.’ He said, ‘I’m Ed Thomas.’ From that day on, we were inseparable.”
After three years of coaching in central Iowa, Thomas moved to Parkersburg in 1975, with Teeple following in 1977 to open Tom’s Barber Shop, now the oldest business downtown. Its dated décor reflects the generations of small-town Iowans he serves. An Aplington-Parkersburg blanket hangs from the wall, alongside pictures of local and regional teams. One poster-sized photo hangs prominently near his mirror, featuring Aaron Thomas — Ed’s oldest son — dribbling a basketball as a guard at Drake University.
Teeple and his daily customers share stories of Aplington-Parkersburg sports lore, and they all feel a connection to Thomas. Chuck Krusey, father-in-law of former Thomas player and NFL vet Brad Meester, joins Teeple in a conversation about Thomas’ knack for turning marginal athletes into varsity contributors.
“He always had a special way of bringing the best out of a person,” says Krusey, president of the Aplington-Parkersburg Booster Club. “That’s what I always remember about Ed. He’d get a 5-8, 125-pound kid to believe he could go through a brick wall.”
Thomas’ lessons rub off on the community as players became full-time employees, husbands and fathers. Thomas’ hot summer football practices taught his players how to battle adversity. With his success on the field and through building a better community, Thomas’ influence grew.
“He combined the emotional, the mental, the physical and the spiritual together as well as any person I’ve ever been around,” said longtime former Iowa assistant Reese Morgan, who, like Thomas, is in the Iowa high school football hall of fame.
When Thomas arrived in 1975, he was single, Parkersburg hadn’t won as many as four games in a row in 16 years, and the field was a patch of scorched earth. By the end of 1980, he was married to his wife, Jan, and he had two young sons, Aaron and Todd. Parkersburg had made the state title game, and he had turned the football field into The Sacred Acre.
Mementos of his late father, family pictures and sports memorabilia surround Aaron Thomas as he sits in his office, the principal’s office, at Aplington-Parkersburg High School. The anniversary of his father’s death, June 24, is just weeks away as he reflects on the whirlwind that began a decade ago.
In 2009, he was the athletics director and boys basketball coach at Union High in La Porte City, about 45 miles southeast of Parkersburg. Aaron was on his way to a conference in Des Moines when he got the news. His father had been shot. His mother had found out first. Jan Thomas, who worked for the town and as a first responder, arrived at the bus barn shortly after the police, who stopped her at the door. Ed lived just long enough for her to say goodbye.
By the time Aaron came home, dozens of reporters and camera crews had arrived in Parkersburg. So, only hours after Ed Thomas’ passing, Aaron and his mother discussed a public statement they wanted to convey.
In a room at Parkersburg Elementary, across the street from the high school still rebuilding from the tornado, Aaron Thomas suppressed his shock and sadness to deliver the family’s three-minute statement. Midway through, his words changed the entire narrative of the tragedy.
“We also want to make sure we express our concern and our compassion for the Becker family,” Aaron said. “We ask that people pray for them as well and that people take time to comfort and be with them through this as they are also going through a lot.”
“It might as well have been Ed talking,” Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz says. “That was Ed personified.”
The Thomas family’s compassion did more than comfort the Beckers. “I just felt like I was washed with a sense of peace,” says Joan, Mark’s mother. “That it was going to be OK. I mean, it’s going to be OK. We’re going to get through this.
“It almost felt like it gave a direction for the community,” says Joan, “that it’s OK to reach out to the Beckers.”
Before Thomas’ public visitation, the family allowed the Beckers to say their goodbyes in private. At the next Sunday service, Jan Thomas passed a note to Joan Becker, a private message that remains in Joan’s Bible.
Aaron remembers how quickly he decided to accept an offer to take over his father’s job as the school’s activities director, how he was compelled to move back to support his mother, a notion he now dismisses. “She’s very independent, strong,” he says. “She didn’t need that. It just felt like it was the right thing to do. It was really a way to honor my dad, to continue everything he stood for. At least if it went south, I’d have nobody to blame but myself.”
Ed Thomas would be proud of how Jan and their sons, Aaron and Todd, have chosen to honor him. The Ed Thomas Family Foundation has made its mission to further his main objective of “teaching young people to do what’s right.” The foundation, funded solely with donations, provides scholarships, maintains athletic facilities and runs a semi-annual leadership academy in Des Moines and Parkersburg. Last fall, in Des Moines, 500 students and administrators from across the state attended the seminar. The event sold out in two hours.
Ed Thomas is also present throughout the school. Aaron sees him every day in the mural that adorns a cafeteria wall, and on the Sports Illustrated cover that featured his father a decade ago. He keeps two copies in his office, one framed, the other resting behind a photo of his three children. And every photo he displays of his father as a football coach includes both Aplington and Parkersburg.
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For decades, the Aplington Panthers, just five miles away, engaged in an all-sports rivalry with the Parkersburg Crusaders. When consolidation discussions got underway in the early 1990s, Ed Thomas worked the region, speaking to groups in every corner of the communities. He’d show up anywhere people gathered; one day bringing boxes of donuts to a grain elevator to speak with farmers about the benefits of the merger. His consensus-building campaign worked. Parkersburg would become the high school, with an enrollment of 250 students, while Aplington became the middle school. Panthers and Crusaders became Falcons without contention.
“He was the key component because he had one tool that no one else had,” says former NFL player Jared DeVries, a junior at the time of the merger. “And that was the game of football. He brought our four senior captains together and laid out a plan. He formed relationships on that field that fell over into the classroom, into the school and then into the community.”
“You didn’t want to disappoint him,” says Aaron Kampman, another of A-P’s NFL vets. “You’re like, this is a real honor to play for this man. There’s a legacy here.”
Aaron Thomas was a freshman on his dad’s team that won the 1993 state title in just the second season after the merger. Then he quarterbacked the squad to a runner-up finish in 1996. His oldest son, Owen, will be a junior quarterback this fall. Second string last year, Owen will compete for the starting job. The thought brings a smile that conceals the pain. Ed Thomas often said he wanted to keep coaching football long enough to lead his grandsons on The Sacred Acre.
“The relationship he and I had when I played for him is probably my fondest sports memory,” says Aaron, now the Falcons’ basketball coach. “Now I get to share that with my kids in basketball. But there’s something special about football and how much my dad would have enjoyed just watching the grandkids compete.
“That’s bittersweet, knowing his passion. … It would have been a special, special thing.”
Thomas won two state titles, finished second four times and made 19 playoff appearances. Only once in 34 seasons at Parkersburg did his team suffer a losing season. Thomas developed four players — DeVries, Kampman, Meester, Casey Wiegmann — who played at least 10 NFL seasons. In 2005, Thomas was named the NFL High School Coach of the Year.
In 1975, everything in Parkersburg was new for Joan Prohaska, whose family had just moved to town. Thomas, also in his first year at Parkersburg, wanted to help Joan fit in, so he introduced her to one of his senior offensive guards, Dave Becker.
“He tried to steer us towards people he thought would be a positive influence,” Joan Becker says now. “It was sweet. When Dave and I started dating, Ed kept asking me, ‘Dave ready for the game? Dave ready for the game?’ It was cute.”
Dave and Joan married after high school and soon had two sons, Brad and Mark. They bought Dave’s grandparents’ home in Parkersburg, then relocated north of town. Seven years after Mark, their youngest son, Scott, was born. All three Becker boys played for Thomas, the family traveling to every game.
“It becomes the whole town’s identity,” Dave Becker says. “I wanted my boys to experience what I had experienced. So I really, really pushed them that way, you know, early on.”
The Beckers attended First Congregational Church with the Thomas family. Dave became a deacon and Ed an elder. The men spoke privately about some of the issues facing Mark, who had experienced mood swings and outbursts. They were more than friends. They were confidants.
Their bond was cemented over Memorial Day weekend in 2008, when the worst tornado to strike Iowa in 32 years slammed into Parkersburg. Winds exceeding 200 mph ripped through the town, destroying 200 homes. The high school was obliterated. Every athletic facility was devastated, including The Sacred Acre. Eight people died.
Two days after the tornado, an emotional Ed Thomas stood at a section of the field that bears his name and admitted he was “in a state of shock.” The bleachers were mangled beyond repair, as was the fencing. Glass, nails and other shrapnel littered the grass. A chunk of the scoreboard was found beyond the city limits. Dave Becker joined Thomas at The Sacred Acre and both stood in disbelief. A bear of a man with large, thick hands, Becker, the equipment superintendent for secondary roads in Butler County, told Thomas he could recruit a group of guys to scrap the bleachers and fencing. It was a daunting task.
A little more than a year before Thomas’ death, much of Parkersburg, including the high school and “The Sacred Acre,” was wiped out by an EF5 tornado that created winds reaching 205 mph. (Steve Pope / Getty Images)
“(Thomas) put his arm around his shoulders and said, ‘Dave, I’m putting you in charge of this,’” Joan says now while looking at Dave. “We got home that night, and we prayed. And Dave goes, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’”
Their prayers were answered. Thomas received calls every hour, and soon a volunteer army rolled into Parkersburg. The cleanup became a summer-long, weekend job. The school’s biggest rival, Dike-New Hartford, offered its football team as manual laborers. Buses of athletes from throughout Iowa came to help all over town. Iowa State sent multiple buses, as did nearby Wartburg College.
“We went up after the tornado,” Ferentz says. “It was just very clear how (Thomas) was looked upon in the community. And then statewide, too. Obviously, people were all looking to him for leadership.”
Thomas’ brand of leadership during that summer reflected his coaching style: assertive when necessary and not too proud to delegate.
Aplington sits just five miles west of Parkersburg, and it still has its football stadium at what is now the middle school. Playing for one year in Aplington, as the rest of the A-P teams would do, seemed natural to everyone. Everyone but Thomas.
“We were having lunch one day and there were these four older gentlemen from Aplington,” says Teeple, who drank coffee with Thomas nearly every morning. “Good guys. As we were walking out, this guy says to coach, ‘Mr. Thomas, don’t worry. We can play football over at Aplington this fall.’ I’d never seen Ed get mad, and he didn’t get mad that day, but we got out of the door and Ed said, ‘Wait a minute.’ He went over and said, ‘Sir, we will play football in Parkersburg in six weeks.’”
The bleachers were important, as were the lights, fences and ticket booths. But nothing mattered more to Thomas than the field itself, the grass of The Sacred Acre.
“One night, he said, ‘Joan, (West Des Moines) Dowling is coming,” Joan recalls. “‘What should we have them do?’”
Shards of glass covered The Sacred Acre. They decided the only way to make the field playable was to pick up every jagged piece. Dowling Catholic’s players crawled on their hands and knees and filled five-gallon buckets with debris. Gradually, The Sacred Acre looked like a football stadium again.
Just hours before kickoff, concrete still poured around Ed Thomas Field. A local television station aired the game live, and Iowa politicians watched from the stands. In a speech broadcast to viewers, Thomas told his players, “In a sense, there are two games tonight, and you’ve already won the first. … Every player who has ever played on that field, I guarantee you, is thinking about you. Every single one of them.”
Aplington-Parkersburg beat West Marshall 53-20 that night. The Falcons finished the season 11-1 and were district champions and a state quarterfinalist.
Scott Becker, the youngest of the family, was a junior on Ed Thomas’s final team, playing both ways. A year later, ESPN televised the first game at The Sacred Acre following Thomas’ death. The Becker family wore red shirts with Scott’s name and number on the back. The day was nerve-wracking for the family, and moments in the stands were awkward. But Scott, who later was named a first-team all-state offensive lineman, received one of the night’s loudest ovations.
“Of course, we were going to support him,” Joan Becker says. “At first, people didn’t know what to say to us. They didn’t know how. But as time went on, people started saying, ‘How are you guys doing?’ They’d actually bring it up. And then they’d start asking, ‘How’s Mark doing?’”
Those questions still come, 10 years later.
On a late-spring Sunday morning, two days before Mark’s 34th birthday, Dave and Joan Becker drive 110 miles south down I-380 to Coralville, Iowa. Mark is serving a life sentence after his 2010 conviction of first-degree murder. He is among 900 inmates at a state facility known as Oakdale, which houses the only licensed inpatient mental health unit among Iowa’s prisons.
Joan and Dave Becker regularly visit their son, who took seven years of therapy and medication before he even viewed them both as mom and dad. They say his mental state has improved to the point where he also recognizes what he has done and now feels remorse and sadness for Thomas’ murder.
“It’s tragic to us that we lost such a good, good man, and to the loss for his family and our community,” Joan Becker says. “It’s very selfish of me to say, but I’m thankful that I got to see my son healed as much as he possibly can be and stabilized with this illness. And that he’s trying to do positive things to help others around him.”
Mark’s “episodes,” as Joan calls them in her book “Sentenced to Life,” included violence directed at her and Dave. One day, Mark punched her in the face as she drove. Another time, he tackled his father as he sat atop a riding lawnmower. Physical threats and other violent acts were followed by apologies and loving gestures, sometimes within minutes of one another. Mark often complained of out-of-body experiences and voices in his head. He had difficulty holding jobs and frequently had scrapes with the law.
Just four days before he shot Thomas, Becker’s erratic behavior escalated. He showed up at a Cedar Falls residence, broke out windows with a baseball bat and rammed a garage door with his vehicle. He then led law enforcement officials on a two-county chase that ended only when he struck a deer. Becker was taken to a hospital in Waterloo — about 30 miles from Parkersburg — for treatment of his wounds and observation. Hospital officials were supposed to notify law enforcement before Becker was discharged. That didn’t happen.
Joan recalls that in May 2009, a medical professional said her son’s diagnosis was likely paranoid schizophrenia and scheduled a psychiatric evaluation for Mark to start him on medication. After Thomas’ murder on June 24, Joan learned that appointment had been scheduled for July.
Joan frequently speaks about mental health issues, part of her healing process. She also still encounters the greatest opposition to improving care: funding.
“The problem is, we are paying for it on the back side in our prison system,” she says. “I keep trying to tell our legislators that if we put the money up front, we won’t have such a high cost on the back side.”
Frustration lingers for the Beckers. They still grieve. When a conversation switches to how Thomas nudged Dave and Joan together, Dave pauses, waves his hand and whispers, “I can’t talk right now.” Both parents well up when they discuss the happy memories of their son. It’s the same when they remember Thomas.
The Beckers left the First Congregation Church for one in Cedar Falls. The weekly reminders and guilt were too much. But the congregation and the Thomas family still embrace them. Every year on the anniversary of the tragedy, Thomas’ younger brother, Greg, contacts Dave Becker with a text or phone call.
“He even called and said, ‘You know, I was asked at a talk the other night. Have you been able to forgive Mark?’” Joan recalls. “And he goes, ‘You know, sir, I had never been asked that. Yes, I forgive Mark.’
“That meant so much to us.”
Three letters hang high on a fence that separates Aplington-Parkersburg High School from the elementary school and represent Ed Thomas’ legacy more than any memory ever could.
Outlined in black, filled in with white and hung diagonally, three Fs and a cross overlook the bus barn and The Sacred Acre. An enduring embodiment of a man.
The first F stands for faith — Thomas’ guiding principle was both unmistakable and unshakeable. “His faith was always first in everything he did,” Aaron Thomas says. “And I think he did a great job of finding ways to incorporate it, never beating anybody over the head, never preaching at them.”
The second F stands for family. In Thomas’ world, his nuclear unit included Jan, sons Aaron and Todd, their spouses and his grandchildren. For those who knew Thomas outside of his home, he was family, too. “When I spoke at his funeral, and I was thinking about what I was going to say, it’s like my best friend died,” Kerns says. “And that’s really selfish, because there are literally hundreds, if not more, people that would say Ed was his best friend.”
The final F is for football. “We would give him a hard time that family was about an inch ahead of football,” Aaron says. “When people would ask questions, he was very good at having a one-on-one conversation. Football was his passion, without a doubt.”
Faith, Family, Football. Devotion, Love, Perseverance.
Thomas’ values flow from his former players down to younger generations. DeVries, Meester and Kampman all coach football in Iowa. Eight years retired from the NFL, Kampman has carried a physical reminder of his coach with him on each step of his football journey. In the glove box of his vehicle, Kampman recently found the old, tattered piece of paper, a letter he received from Thomas as an eighth-grader.
In closing, “A Champion” reads:
“As a final word, remember that you are the only one who decides whether or not to be a champion. For you and you alone are the only one who decides if you’re going to work as hard as you can. Not your coach. Not your doctor. Not your teammates. But You!!!!
“So let’s get one thing straight. If you want to be a champion, get it in your mind right now that you’re gonna train and play as hard as you can, and ain’t nothing or nobody gonna stop you. For you’re on your way to becoming a champion, and God help whoever gets in your way.”
Thomas’ words resound. They endure. They inspire.
“That document meant so much to me as a young person and resonated with what I wanted out of life,” Kampman says. “I kept that in my locker at Iowa, and in my locker at Green Bay, and in my locker at Jacksonville. He understood that it was healthy for young men to be part of something bigger than themselves. And he would talk about that all you’ve got to do is care. Just show up and care.
“We’ll do the rest.”
Hook'emMourners from near and far have come to a high school football stadium in Iowa on a steamy June evening in 2009. They surround the field, circle the fence and pile into metal bleachers, seats that weren’t even here a year ago. An EF5 tornado tore through Parkersburg, leveling nearly half the town, including the home grandstand. The crowd is here to honor Ed Thomas, a man whom most have met and whom all revere, the man who spent the past year leading Parkersburg’s revival, the man whose name graces this field.
Ed Thomas Field, home of the Aplington-Parkersburg Falcons, is known throughout northern Iowa as “The Sacred Acre.” And despite the football heroics of Thomas, grief fills this hallowed place as the community stands vigil only hours after Thomas’ death. Just 50 yards from the ticket booth, in a bus barn turned weight room, police tape cordons off the crime scene.
Pastors speak of forgiveness and compassion, peace and love; the same tenets the man everyone called coach. Walking among the crowd, town barber Tom Teeple can’t take more than a few steps without a hug. As he moves past familiar faces, Teeple approaches a distraught woman whom he has never seen. He stops and asks her if she knew coach Thomas. She tells him how she drove three hours that night to honor the man for patiently working with her son at a football camp and for helping her boy turn his life around.
Everyone has a story.
Al Kerns, Thomas’ assistant coach for 31 years and one of his best friends, will recall 10 years later how the night’s events have all blurred together. “I can’t tell you how many people came up to say, ‘Coach, I never met him, but he wrote me a letter.’ High school kids or people he’d find out about, maybe they had done something outstanding, or had overcome adversity. And he would write them a letter.”
It seems every resident in Butler County is here, each talking about coach Thomas. It’s unconscionable that he’s gone.
On the morning of June 24, 2009, former Aplington-Parkersburg player Mark Becker, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, walked into the bus barn and, in front of more than 20 athletes, inexplicably shot Thomas multiple times in the head. He was 58.
A decade removed from Thomas’ death, calm fills The Sacred Acre. The grass glimmers in the sun, as immaculate as when Thomas trimmed it to perfection. The rows align from north to south, save for a small patch of clover just beyond the east goalpost. A dented and weathered “Falcon Country” sign perches high beyond the west end zone. The battered sign withstood the violent wind.
The community took two fists to the face — one from nature, one from man — yet remains intact. Parkersburg has actually grown by 100 residents to nearly 2,000 since Thomas’s passing. The town’s resiliency is apparent from the new neighborhoods springing up on the south side to the full storefronts downtown.
“I think he’d be kind of proud of us,” Teeple says from his barbershop on Third Street. His mind, as it often does, falls back to the early ’70s, to the first time he met coach Thomas.
The town of What Cheer lies both in the middle of everywhere and nowhere in rural Iowa; not considered east, south or central. Too small (646 residents) to have its own high school, What Cheer’s only memorable feature is its name.
What Cheer is one of a handful of towns that make up Tri-County High School. Thomas graduated from there in 1968 before playing football at William Penn College in nearby Oskaloosa. Thomas was back home when he ran into a stranger at a service station.
“He had hair down to here,” says Teeple, pointing to his shoulder. “Wire-rimmed glasses and bell-bottomed pants. He said, ‘Who are you?’ I told him, ‘I’m the new barber in town.’ He said, ‘I’m Ed Thomas.’ From that day on, we were inseparable.”
After three years of coaching in central Iowa, Thomas moved to Parkersburg in 1975, with Teeple following in 1977 to open Tom’s Barber Shop, now the oldest business downtown. Its dated décor reflects the generations of small-town Iowans he serves. An Aplington-Parkersburg blanket hangs from the wall, alongside pictures of local and regional teams. One poster-sized photo hangs prominently near his mirror, featuring Aaron Thomas — Ed’s oldest son — dribbling a basketball as a guard at Drake University.
Teeple and his daily customers share stories of Aplington-Parkersburg sports lore, and they all feel a connection to Thomas. Chuck Krusey, father-in-law of former Thomas player and NFL vet Brad Meester, joins Teeple in a conversation about Thomas’ knack for turning marginal athletes into varsity contributors.
“He always had a special way of bringing the best out of a person,” says Krusey, president of the Aplington-Parkersburg Booster Club. “That’s what I always remember about Ed. He’d get a 5-8, 125-pound kid to believe he could go through a brick wall.”
Thomas’ lessons rub off on the community as players became full-time employees, husbands and fathers. Thomas’ hot summer football practices taught his players how to battle adversity. With his success on the field and through building a better community, Thomas’ influence grew.
“He combined the emotional, the mental, the physical and the spiritual together as well as any person I’ve ever been around,” said longtime former Iowa assistant Reese Morgan, who, like Thomas, is in the Iowa high school football hall of fame.
When Thomas arrived in 1975, he was single, Parkersburg hadn’t won as many as four games in a row in 16 years, and the field was a patch of scorched earth. By the end of 1980, he was married to his wife, Jan, and he had two young sons, Aaron and Todd. Parkersburg had made the state title game, and he had turned the football field into The Sacred Acre.
Mementos of his late father, family pictures and sports memorabilia surround Aaron Thomas as he sits in his office, the principal’s office, at Aplington-Parkersburg High School. The anniversary of his father’s death, June 24, is just weeks away as he reflects on the whirlwind that began a decade ago.
In 2009, he was the athletics director and boys basketball coach at Union High in La Porte City, about 45 miles southeast of Parkersburg. Aaron was on his way to a conference in Des Moines when he got the news. His father had been shot. His mother had found out first. Jan Thomas, who worked for the town and as a first responder, arrived at the bus barn shortly after the police, who stopped her at the door. Ed lived just long enough for her to say goodbye.
By the time Aaron came home, dozens of reporters and camera crews had arrived in Parkersburg. So, only hours after Ed Thomas’ passing, Aaron and his mother discussed a public statement they wanted to convey.
In a room at Parkersburg Elementary, across the street from the high school still rebuilding from the tornado, Aaron Thomas suppressed his shock and sadness to deliver the family’s three-minute statement. Midway through, his words changed the entire narrative of the tragedy.
“We also want to make sure we express our concern and our compassion for the Becker family,” Aaron said. “We ask that people pray for them as well and that people take time to comfort and be with them through this as they are also going through a lot.”
“It might as well have been Ed talking,” Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz says. “That was Ed personified.”
The Thomas family’s compassion did more than comfort the Beckers. “I just felt like I was washed with a sense of peace,” says Joan, Mark’s mother. “That it was going to be OK. I mean, it’s going to be OK. We’re going to get through this.
“It almost felt like it gave a direction for the community,” says Joan, “that it’s OK to reach out to the Beckers.”
Before Thomas’ public visitation, the family allowed the Beckers to say their goodbyes in private. At the next Sunday service, Jan Thomas passed a note to Joan Becker, a private message that remains in Joan’s Bible.
Aaron remembers how quickly he decided to accept an offer to take over his father’s job as the school’s activities director, how he was compelled to move back to support his mother, a notion he now dismisses. “She’s very independent, strong,” he says. “She didn’t need that. It just felt like it was the right thing to do. It was really a way to honor my dad, to continue everything he stood for. At least if it went south, I’d have nobody to blame but myself.”
Ed Thomas would be proud of how Jan and their sons, Aaron and Todd, have chosen to honor him. The Ed Thomas Family Foundation has made its mission to further his main objective of “teaching young people to do what’s right.” The foundation, funded solely with donations, provides scholarships, maintains athletic facilities and runs a semi-annual leadership academy in Des Moines and Parkersburg. Last fall, in Des Moines, 500 students and administrators from across the state attended the seminar. The event sold out in two hours.
Ed Thomas is also present throughout the school. Aaron sees him every day in the mural that adorns a cafeteria wall, and on the Sports Illustrated cover that featured his father a decade ago. He keeps two copies in his office, one framed, the other resting behind a photo of his three children. And every photo he displays of his father as a football coach includes both Aplington and Parkersburg.
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For decades, the Aplington Panthers, just five miles away, engaged in an all-sports rivalry with the Parkersburg Crusaders. When consolidation discussions got underway in the early 1990s, Ed Thomas worked the region, speaking to groups in every corner of the communities. He’d show up anywhere people gathered; one day bringing boxes of donuts to a grain elevator to speak with farmers about the benefits of the merger. His consensus-building campaign worked. Parkersburg would become the high school, with an enrollment of 250 students, while Aplington became the middle school. Panthers and Crusaders became Falcons without contention.
“He was the key component because he had one tool that no one else had,” says former NFL player Jared DeVries, a junior at the time of the merger. “And that was the game of football. He brought our four senior captains together and laid out a plan. He formed relationships on that field that fell over into the classroom, into the school and then into the community.”
“You didn’t want to disappoint him,” says Aaron Kampman, another of A-P’s NFL vets. “You’re like, this is a real honor to play for this man. There’s a legacy here.”
Aaron Thomas was a freshman on his dad’s team that won the 1993 state title in just the second season after the merger. Then he quarterbacked the squad to a runner-up finish in 1996. His oldest son, Owen, will be a junior quarterback this fall. Second string last year, Owen will compete for the starting job. The thought brings a smile that conceals the pain. Ed Thomas often said he wanted to keep coaching football long enough to lead his grandsons on The Sacred Acre.
“The relationship he and I had when I played for him is probably my fondest sports memory,” says Aaron, now the Falcons’ basketball coach. “Now I get to share that with my kids in basketball. But there’s something special about football and how much my dad would have enjoyed just watching the grandkids compete.
“That’s bittersweet, knowing his passion. … It would have been a special, special thing.”
Thomas won two state titles, finished second four times and made 19 playoff appearances. Only once in 34 seasons at Parkersburg did his team suffer a losing season. Thomas developed four players — DeVries, Kampman, Meester, Casey Wiegmann — who played at least 10 NFL seasons. In 2005, Thomas was named the NFL High School Coach of the Year.
In 1975, everything in Parkersburg was new for Joan Prohaska, whose family had just moved to town. Thomas, also in his first year at Parkersburg, wanted to help Joan fit in, so he introduced her to one of his senior offensive guards, Dave Becker.
“He tried to steer us towards people he thought would be a positive influence,” Joan Becker says now. “It was sweet. When Dave and I started dating, Ed kept asking me, ‘Dave ready for the game? Dave ready for the game?’ It was cute.”
Dave and Joan married after high school and soon had two sons, Brad and Mark. They bought Dave’s grandparents’ home in Parkersburg, then relocated north of town. Seven years after Mark, their youngest son, Scott, was born. All three Becker boys played for Thomas, the family traveling to every game.
“It becomes the whole town’s identity,” Dave Becker says. “I wanted my boys to experience what I had experienced. So I really, really pushed them that way, you know, early on.”
The Beckers attended First Congregational Church with the Thomas family. Dave became a deacon and Ed an elder. The men spoke privately about some of the issues facing Mark, who had experienced mood swings and outbursts. They were more than friends. They were confidants.
Their bond was cemented over Memorial Day weekend in 2008, when the worst tornado to strike Iowa in 32 years slammed into Parkersburg. Winds exceeding 200 mph ripped through the town, destroying 200 homes. The high school was obliterated. Every athletic facility was devastated, including The Sacred Acre. Eight people died.
Two days after the tornado, an emotional Ed Thomas stood at a section of the field that bears his name and admitted he was “in a state of shock.” The bleachers were mangled beyond repair, as was the fencing. Glass, nails and other shrapnel littered the grass. A chunk of the scoreboard was found beyond the city limits. Dave Becker joined Thomas at The Sacred Acre and both stood in disbelief. A bear of a man with large, thick hands, Becker, the equipment superintendent for secondary roads in Butler County, told Thomas he could recruit a group of guys to scrap the bleachers and fencing. It was a daunting task.
A little more than a year before Thomas’ death, much of Parkersburg, including the high school and “The Sacred Acre,” was wiped out by an EF5 tornado that created winds reaching 205 mph. (Steve Pope / Getty Images)
“(Thomas) put his arm around his shoulders and said, ‘Dave, I’m putting you in charge of this,’” Joan says now while looking at Dave. “We got home that night, and we prayed. And Dave goes, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’”
Their prayers were answered. Thomas received calls every hour, and soon a volunteer army rolled into Parkersburg. The cleanup became a summer-long, weekend job. The school’s biggest rival, Dike-New Hartford, offered its football team as manual laborers. Buses of athletes from throughout Iowa came to help all over town. Iowa State sent multiple buses, as did nearby Wartburg College.
“We went up after the tornado,” Ferentz says. “It was just very clear how (Thomas) was looked upon in the community. And then statewide, too. Obviously, people were all looking to him for leadership.”
Thomas’ brand of leadership during that summer reflected his coaching style: assertive when necessary and not too proud to delegate.
Aplington sits just five miles west of Parkersburg, and it still has its football stadium at what is now the middle school. Playing for one year in Aplington, as the rest of the A-P teams would do, seemed natural to everyone. Everyone but Thomas.
“We were having lunch one day and there were these four older gentlemen from Aplington,” says Teeple, who drank coffee with Thomas nearly every morning. “Good guys. As we were walking out, this guy says to coach, ‘Mr. Thomas, don’t worry. We can play football over at Aplington this fall.’ I’d never seen Ed get mad, and he didn’t get mad that day, but we got out of the door and Ed said, ‘Wait a minute.’ He went over and said, ‘Sir, we will play football in Parkersburg in six weeks.’”
The bleachers were important, as were the lights, fences and ticket booths. But nothing mattered more to Thomas than the field itself, the grass of The Sacred Acre.
“One night, he said, ‘Joan, (West Des Moines) Dowling is coming,” Joan recalls. “‘What should we have them do?’”
Shards of glass covered The Sacred Acre. They decided the only way to make the field playable was to pick up every jagged piece. Dowling Catholic’s players crawled on their hands and knees and filled five-gallon buckets with debris. Gradually, The Sacred Acre looked like a football stadium again.
Just hours before kickoff, concrete still poured around Ed Thomas Field. A local television station aired the game live, and Iowa politicians watched from the stands. In a speech broadcast to viewers, Thomas told his players, “In a sense, there are two games tonight, and you’ve already won the first. … Every player who has ever played on that field, I guarantee you, is thinking about you. Every single one of them.”
Aplington-Parkersburg beat West Marshall 53-20 that night. The Falcons finished the season 11-1 and were district champions and a state quarterfinalist.
Scott Becker, the youngest of the family, was a junior on Ed Thomas’s final team, playing both ways. A year later, ESPN televised the first game at The Sacred Acre following Thomas’ death. The Becker family wore red shirts with Scott’s name and number on the back. The day was nerve-wracking for the family, and moments in the stands were awkward. But Scott, who later was named a first-team all-state offensive lineman, received one of the night’s loudest ovations.
“Of course, we were going to support him,” Joan Becker says. “At first, people didn’t know what to say to us. They didn’t know how. But as time went on, people started saying, ‘How are you guys doing?’ They’d actually bring it up. And then they’d start asking, ‘How’s Mark doing?’”
Those questions still come, 10 years later.
On a late-spring Sunday morning, two days before Mark’s 34th birthday, Dave and Joan Becker drive 110 miles south down I-380 to Coralville, Iowa. Mark is serving a life sentence after his 2010 conviction of first-degree murder. He is among 900 inmates at a state facility known as Oakdale, which houses the only licensed inpatient mental health unit among Iowa’s prisons.
Joan and Dave Becker regularly visit their son, who took seven years of therapy and medication before he even viewed them both as mom and dad. They say his mental state has improved to the point where he also recognizes what he has done and now feels remorse and sadness for Thomas’ murder.
“It’s tragic to us that we lost such a good, good man, and to the loss for his family and our community,” Joan Becker says. “It’s very selfish of me to say, but I’m thankful that I got to see my son healed as much as he possibly can be and stabilized with this illness. And that he’s trying to do positive things to help others around him.”
Mark’s “episodes,” as Joan calls them in her book “Sentenced to Life,” included violence directed at her and Dave. One day, Mark punched her in the face as she drove. Another time, he tackled his father as he sat atop a riding lawnmower. Physical threats and other violent acts were followed by apologies and loving gestures, sometimes within minutes of one another. Mark often complained of out-of-body experiences and voices in his head. He had difficulty holding jobs and frequently had scrapes with the law.
Just four days before he shot Thomas, Becker’s erratic behavior escalated. He showed up at a Cedar Falls residence, broke out windows with a baseball bat and rammed a garage door with his vehicle. He then led law enforcement officials on a two-county chase that ended only when he struck a deer. Becker was taken to a hospital in Waterloo — about 30 miles from Parkersburg — for treatment of his wounds and observation. Hospital officials were supposed to notify law enforcement before Becker was discharged. That didn’t happen.
Joan recalls that in May 2009, a medical professional said her son’s diagnosis was likely paranoid schizophrenia and scheduled a psychiatric evaluation for Mark to start him on medication. After Thomas’ murder on June 24, Joan learned that appointment had been scheduled for July.
Joan frequently speaks about mental health issues, part of her healing process. She also still encounters the greatest opposition to improving care: funding.
“The problem is, we are paying for it on the back side in our prison system,” she says. “I keep trying to tell our legislators that if we put the money up front, we won’t have such a high cost on the back side.”
Frustration lingers for the Beckers. They still grieve. When a conversation switches to how Thomas nudged Dave and Joan together, Dave pauses, waves his hand and whispers, “I can’t talk right now.” Both parents well up when they discuss the happy memories of their son. It’s the same when they remember Thomas.
The Beckers left the First Congregation Church for one in Cedar Falls. The weekly reminders and guilt were too much. But the congregation and the Thomas family still embrace them. Every year on the anniversary of the tragedy, Thomas’ younger brother, Greg, contacts Dave Becker with a text or phone call.
“He even called and said, ‘You know, I was asked at a talk the other night. Have you been able to forgive Mark?’” Joan recalls. “And he goes, ‘You know, sir, I had never been asked that. Yes, I forgive Mark.’
“That meant so much to us.”
Three letters hang high on a fence that separates Aplington-Parkersburg High School from the elementary school and represent Ed Thomas’ legacy more than any memory ever could.
Outlined in black, filled in with white and hung diagonally, three Fs and a cross overlook the bus barn and The Sacred Acre. An enduring embodiment of a man.
The first F stands for faith — Thomas’ guiding principle was both unmistakable and unshakeable. “His faith was always first in everything he did,” Aaron Thomas says. “And I think he did a great job of finding ways to incorporate it, never beating anybody over the head, never preaching at them.”
The second F stands for family. In Thomas’ world, his nuclear unit included Jan, sons Aaron and Todd, their spouses and his grandchildren. For those who knew Thomas outside of his home, he was family, too. “When I spoke at his funeral, and I was thinking about what I was going to say, it’s like my best friend died,” Kerns says. “And that’s really selfish, because there are literally hundreds, if not more, people that would say Ed was his best friend.”
The final F is for football. “We would give him a hard time that family was about an inch ahead of football,” Aaron says. “When people would ask questions, he was very good at having a one-on-one conversation. Football was his passion, without a doubt.”
Faith, Family, Football. Devotion, Love, Perseverance.
Thomas’ values flow from his former players down to younger generations. DeVries, Meester and Kampman all coach football in Iowa. Eight years retired from the NFL, Kampman has carried a physical reminder of his coach with him on each step of his football journey. In the glove box of his vehicle, Kampman recently found the old, tattered piece of paper, a letter he received from Thomas as an eighth-grader.
In closing, “A Champion” reads:
“As a final word, remember that you are the only one who decides whether or not to be a champion. For you and you alone are the only one who decides if you’re going to work as hard as you can. Not your coach. Not your doctor. Not your teammates. But You!!!!
“So let’s get one thing straight. If you want to be a champion, get it in your mind right now that you’re gonna train and play as hard as you can, and ain’t nothing or nobody gonna stop you. For you’re on your way to becoming a champion, and God help whoever gets in your way.”
Thomas’ words resound. They endure. They inspire.
“That document meant so much to me as a young person and resonated with what I wanted out of life,” Kampman says. “I kept that in my locker at Iowa, and in my locker at Green Bay, and in my locker at Jacksonville. He understood that it was healthy for young men to be part of something bigger than themselves. And he would talk about that all you’ve got to do is care. Just show up and care.
“We’ll do the rest.”
