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Longtime hoops assistant shaped great area talents

“One day this past summer I just walked through the halls at school — no one else was around — and I decided, ‘I’m ready,’ ” said longtime area basketball coach Jim Ehler of his decision to retire after this season.

Staff photo by Jim Noelker “One day this past summer I just walked through the halls at school — no one else was around — and I decided, ‘I’m ready,’ ” said longtime area basketball coach Jim Ehler of his decision to retire after this season.

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By Tom Archdeacon, Staff Writer 9:13 PM Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Jim Brown laughed when he told the story about his longtime assistant basketball coach — 81-year-old Jim Ehler — who a few years back was chiding the Northmont High team, which hadn’t played well:

“He had the guys in the locker room and he was going on and on and finally he says, ‘The trouble with you guys is you spend too much time on the skirts.’ ”

Like an alley-oop pass with too much oomph, his 1950s Mike Hammer lingo went over the heads of most of the Generation Y teens. One player, though, tried to figure it out, Brown said:

“The kid goes home and tells his dad, ‘Coach Ehler said something I don’t understand. What’s a skirt?’ His dad started laughing and said, ‘A girl. He’s talking about girls.’ ”

The kid understood, knew the coach was right and by season’s end he and his redirected teammates had had another good year.

Once again Jim Ehler had shown himself to be a man of all ages.

No basketball coach in the Miami Valley has had a career quite like Ehler’s. He’s been a sidelines fixture for 60 years — 35 in high school and 25 with the University of Dayton and Wright State.

He’s been a head coach at three different schools, was an athletic director at Fairmont East and he assisted three of this area’s best-known coaches — former UD coach Don Donoher, former WSU coach Ralph Underhill and Brown, the former WSU and current Northmont coach.

When Northmont hosts Wayne on Friday night, Feb. 12, Ehler will be honored before the game. When the season ends, he’s retiring to spend time with his new wife and his other many interests.

No easy decision

“One day this past summer I just walked through the halls at school — no one else was around — and I decided, ‘I’m ready,’ ” he said. “It’s not an easy decision, but I know it’s time.”

Over the years, he’s coached at schools that are long gone — his alma mater Lanier High in Preble County and Fairmont East — and in games that will never be forgotten.

He was on the bench for the Flyers’ five-overtime victory over Providence in 1982 and their victory over No. 3 DePaul — thanks to “The Shot” by Ed Young — that began their run to the NCAA tournament’s Elite Eight in 1984.

He was there, too, for Wright State’s own version of buzzer-beater glory — Delme Herriman’s jumper to beat 25th-ranked Xavier in the Midwestern Collegiate Conference tournament in 1995.

Along the way he’s helped coach everybody from UD’s Johnny Davis, Jim Paxson, Donald Smith and Roosevelt Chapman to WSU’s Bill Edwards and Vitaly Potapenko and Northmont’s Kenny Hayes, now a Miami star.

And yet for all of this he may be even more celebrated in track and field. He was a successful prep coach, a longtime starter of the state’s top meets and is in the Ohio Track and Field Hall of Fame.

Some of his best stories — involving President Gerald Ford, Bob Hope and Foster Brooks — come from the golf world, where he spent some three decades as a starter and caddie master for everything from the Bogey Busters to the area’s biggest pro tournaments, including the 1969 PGA Championship.

That’s where Chi Chi Rodriguez — about to combust because he had not been allowed to use his personal caddy — went through three local bag-toters until Ehler cajoled him and got him the right kid to settle his game and let him leave Dayton happy.

That’s classic Ehler — the always-positive Mr. Fix It.

After graduating from Miami University in 1950, he coached two years at Lanier — “back then you were the head coach, the assistant, you drove the bus and washed the uniforms” — and two at Versailles before he joined the Kettering school system for 18 years.

Donoher — who calls him “a totally dedicated basketball man” — added Ehler to his staff in 1971, and they were together 17 seasons until UD brought in a new coaching staff.

Underhill — thanks to prompting by Brown, his longtime assistant — promptly hired Ehler in 1989 and on Jan. 6, 1990, WSU came into UD Arena and beat the Flyers 101-99.

“I worked with a couple of great college coaches,” Ehler said as his eyes began to tear. “Mick Donoher is the most loyal man in the world. He just has a great allegiance to the game. And working with Ralph was a hoot.

“The two men are different in a lot of ways. Mick is terribly organized. Ask him what we did in 1976 and he has the exact practice schedules. His pencils would all be in a row — erasers up — at least until (George) Janky came in and screwed them up.

“Ralph had all his stuff written on matchbooks and napkins and slips of paper he kept in his pocket, and you know that system worked, too.”

A Northmont fixture

In 1997, when Brown took over at Northmont he asked Ehler to join him.

Ehler said he’d try it for two years. He has stayed 13 and the program — with recent 20-win seasons and huge victories over some of the state’s best teams — has turned around.

“He’s the perfect assistant coach,” said Brown, who knows something about the job after 26 seasons as a WSU assistant.

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