More Than A Coach: Joe Lombard's Journey Through Faith, Joy And Heartbreak To a Record 19 State Championships And 1,379 Wins

Driving on West Texas roads leaves a man time to think, time to pray, time to ponder, time to plan, time to envision, time to listen. At first, it was a tug, but by the spring of 1978, after 2 1/2 years as a salesman for Cleveland Athletics, it was more than that. It was a calling. By then, he never felt so sure, so directed of anything in his 25-year-old life.Joe Lombard wanted to coach basketball. With jobs scarce, there was one opening that intrigued him. It was for a head girls coach at tiny Nazareth. He had never even seen a women's basketball game until he got to college, but he nervously and excitedly applied."Are you sure you want to coach girls?" asked his father.Over the next 42 years, Lombard would carve out a career that would make him perhaps the greatest high school girls basketball coach in history. It was, a career that would earn him induction into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame. HIs teams won 19 state championships and a remarkable 91 percent of their games for a 1,370-133 record that ended in 2020.In More Than A Coach, not only is his life that began in basketball-crazed Indiana in the 1950s chronicled, but Lombard also shares coaching advice, insight, philosophy, his Christian faith, and ranks everything from best teams to toughest losses, from top comebacks and buzzer-beaters to best rivalries in a coaching career that will likely never be equaled. Read more