Edward Arthur Thomas didn’t often answer to “Mr. Thomas,” though he was raised in a family full of teachers. He didn’t often answer to “Deacon Thomas,” though that was who he was at his church — a man who taught adult Sunday school and would even deliver a sermon if his church’s pastor needed to miss service. And he rarely, if at all, answered to “Ed” when it came to younger people who found themselves in his presence. Ed Thomas was “Coach,” and that was enough.
How that honorific was earned and what it came to mean in the small town of Parkersburg, Iowa, the national honors bestowed on the community because of Thomas, and the national tragedy that was his death are the subject of “Sacred Acre,” a narrative podcast produced and narrated by Tom Rinaldi of FOX Sports.
Tom Rinaldi Presents: Sacred Acre
There are two big pieces to Thomas’ story that will pull folks into this tale even if they did not grow up in Iowa, let alone Parkersburg, where Thomas coached the Parkersburg Falcons high school football team, or in What Cheer, Iowa, where he grew up.
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The first is that Thomas was one of the best high school coaches the world has ever seen.
Thomas didn’t play college or pro football. Nor did he ever coach college or pro football. He was a coach who prized the Wing T, running the ball, leaning on staples like 52 trap, 38 sweep, 25 reverse.
In a town with just more than 2,000 residents, seven churches and one high school football team, Thomas won 292 games and two state titles while helping guide five players — Aaron Kampan, Brad Meester, Jared DeVries, Casey Weigmann and Landon Schrage — to the NFL.
More than a million kids play high school football annually, and 0.5% of them reach the NFL. Yet Thomas produced five NFL players, including four of them in a 10-year span. In 2005, Thomas was recognized as the NFL’s High School Coach of the Year.
But Thomas never thought that was part of his job.
“I think we stress sportsmanship. I think we stress to our kids to be the very best you can be with the God-given talent you have,” Thomas said. “And our job is not to create college athletes or professional athletes. Our job is to help our young people become the very best they can be. And that will allow them, if they have the God-given tools, to play at the next level.”
The second main piece of Thomas’ story is his tragic murder.
A former player, Mark Becker, who had recently been released from Covenant Medical Center in Waterloo Hospital, walked into the high school gym in Parkersburg on June 24, 2009, and shot Thomas five times.
Becker was convicted of first-degree murder in 2010 and sentenced to life in prison.
At conflict is how a 24-year-old Becker arrived at the decision to shoot and kill Thomas. At conflict is how a small community nurtured by faith and furnished by football responded to the loss of one of its beloved patriarchs to a gruesome murder perpetrated by one of its own. At conflict is how Becker’s family learned that a brother or a son had been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic.
What comfort is there to seek for those who still mourn a man who came to personify Parkersburg, Iowa, a man who represented values Americans hold dearest while coaching the national pastime — football — for boys who need it most?
At resolution is how the Thomas family, the Becker family and Parkersburg chose to continue performing what Thomas’ program had for nearly 40 years: They accepted this tragedy. They chose to lean on their values of faith, to continue to do disciplined and detailed work, to do the best they could with what God gave them.
That’s the story of Ed Thomas in “Sacred Acre.”
RJ Young is a national college football writer and analyst for FOX Sports and the host of the podcast “The Number One College Football Show.” Follow him at @RJ_Young and subscribe to “The RJ Young Show” on YouTube.
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