600 wins and counting for Iowa City High Coach Don Showalter

IOWA CITY - Somewhere along the line, Don Showalter became pretty good at this basketball coaching stuff.

He lost his first dozen games as a rookie at Lone Tree in the 1974-75 season. The breakthrough came in game 13.

'They were 0-36, and I came in and took the job and went 0-12,” Showalter said. 'My first win was against Louisa-Muscatine. They were pretty good, but we won that game and several more that first year. I think I could have been mayor of the town that first year.”

Showalter, 63, spent two years at Lone Tree before moving on to Elkader Central, where he took up residence for eight years. Then it was 28 years at Mid-Prairie, where he firmly established himself as one of the better coaches in the state.

He has officially turned around the program at Iowa City High in his four years there. The Little Hawks went 12-9 in the regular season, their first winning campaign since 2008-09, tied for the Mississippi Valley Conference's Mississippi Division championship and beat rival Iowa City West for the first time in 15 tries.

City High hosts Cedar Rapids Prairie in a Class 4A substate semifinal Friday night. Oh, and Showalter notched career victory 600 a couple of weeks ago, too.

'You never start out thinking 200 or 100, or I'm going to coach this amount of years,” said Showalter. 'But as you go along, you have great players and great administrators. If you think you can coach 42 years at the high-school level, you've got to have great administrators. And, of course, there's my wife (Vicki). When you have a wife that's behind you, that means a ton. All those things go into (600 wins). And I still have fun doing it.”

Showalter has taken a major role within this country's governing basketball body as well. He has been named USA Basketball's Development Coach of the Year seven years in a row for his work with the U16 and U17 programs.

The team is 43-0 under his leadership since 2009 and has captured four FIBA Americas U16 gold medals and three U17 golds. He said he first met people from USA Basketball in 1998, and was asked to coach in the Hoops Summit, which featured the best seniors from the United States against international teams.

'If they like what you do, they ask you to come back,” he said. 'In 2006, FIBA started U16 tournaments. It's been huge to coach at the best level there is, with the best players. The relationships you build are great.

'(Milwaukee Bucks forward) Jabari Parker and I still text back and forth, for instance. You just develop neat relationships like that. That was one of the reasons I took the City High job. Not because the players are better than at Mid-Prairie, although they are a little better athletes. But it's the diversity. We had that at the USA Basketball level, and we have that at City High. I love that aspect of it.”

Showalter said he has no plans to retire from coaching anytime soon. He retired from teaching when he left Mid-Prairie for City High and said he still thinks he relates well with today's kids.

Are those kids different than they were 42 years ago?

'People ask me that a lot,” he said. 'I really don't think so. I think there's more you deal with. Things like social media and stuff. But you still have to deal with the same issues you dealt with back in 1974. How do you build a culture here? This is how you do things, here is how you practice.

'Those kinds of things you still kind of have to deal with.”

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