Turnbull follows in father's winning footsteps

By SCOTT SANDSBERRY
YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC

It isn't particularly easy growing up when home is a basketball family in a place like Friday Harbor.

The community of perhaps 6,000 or 7,000 full-time residents is separated from every other town and team by water, because on San Juan Island, Friday Harbor is pretty much all there is.

Friday Harbor coach Rod Turnbull talks to his team during a timeout on Wednesday.  SARA GETTYS/Yakima Herald-Republic

So whenever you want to play against anybody besides your buddies from down the street, you have to take a ferry. And make sure you get finished in time to catch the late ferry back to the island, or you won't be getting home that night.

When Rod Turnbull was playing high school basketball for Friday Harbor, all four Wolverine teams — boys and girls varsity and JV squads — would routinely take off at mid-day on a Friday and take the ferry to the mainland.

They would play games at one school that night, spend the night in the gymnasium they played in — and, yes, sleeping bags on a hardwood floor are just about as comfortable as you might imagine — then play at another school early enough on Saturday to catch the last ferry back to the island.

"In a sense, life was normal. Basketball was basketball," recalls Turnbull of his high school playing days. "But being a teenager growing up without your dad ..."

That was the hard part. Rod's father, Dean Turnbull, had been the Friday Harbor basketball coach for as long as Rod could remember — since Dean and his wife, Kathy, moved the family from the Seattle sprawl to San Juan Island and bought a five-cabin campground/resort. It wasn't a life of ease — running the resort could be hard work — but it was comfortable. Dean Turnbull also taught a variety of courses at the high school and coached the basketball team.

In retrospect, Rod Turnbull says, the signs were all there. His father complained of shoulder pains, of bursitis. He smoked. Heart disease ran in his family. But, of course, none of that made it any easier when, in 1980 while on a shopping trip on the mainland with his wife, Dean Turnbull had a heart attack. And then, at the hospital, another. He died that night.

The loss was felt throughout the Friday Harbor community. In addition to his teaching and coaching duties, Dean Turnbull had also been instrumental in getting the school's new gymnasium built. When he died, it was almost completed.

Upon its completion, the school gave the gym a name: Dean Turnbull Gymnasium.

Rod continued with basketball, playing under two different head coaches before graduating, but it just wasn't the same. Upon graduation, he went off to college and then — with his wife, Sue, his high school sweetheart — to a teaching and coaching career in California, a thousand miles and two states away from the San Juan Islands.

Rod's mother, Kathy, stayed in Friday Harbor, never remarried and became a faithful public servant, elected to various city and county positions. These days, she's the county treasurer.

When his grandmother died, Rod Turnbull decided it was time to move back closer to home. In 1995, he took a high school teaching and coaching job at Lynden High School, head coach of a program with a storied history. Although he took the Lions to the state tournament in four of six years and while his players made him feel welcome, the community, he says, never did. He sensed a nagging "Why is a Friday Harbor guy coaching our Lynden boys?"

It just wasn't home. And when his 2002 team fell short of the state tourney — and of community expectations — he answered the call from Friday Harbor to come home as the school's athletic director and head basketball coach.

This is his fourth season back in Friday Harbor. In his first year, the Wolverines didn't make it into the district playoffs. The next year they made it to district but went two-and-out. Last year they again reached district, but lost in a loser-out game to eventual state third-placer Seattle Christian.

This year, for only the fourth time in school history, the first since 1991 and the first in the Class 1A ranks, the Wolverines are in the state tournament. At home, they play before a full house in a gymnasium named for one Turnbull, and now they're playing for another Turnbull.

The Wolverines went unbeaten in their league for the first time since 1972, when Dean Turnbull's best player was a kid named Steve Stoddard. Steve's nephew, Chad, is the best player on Rod Turnbull's team.

In an island community, things may go in cycles, but ultimately they remain the same. A Turnbull is running the basketball show. Things are good.

And, yes, you can go home again.