Remembering the patriarch of Mountlake Terrace hoops

Published 10:54 pm Monday, January 12, 2009

Merle Blevins, who coached boys basketball at Mountlake Terrace High School from the school’s inception in the fall of 1960 through the team’s 1977 Class AAA state championship, is remembered as a man with a passion for teaching and for guiding teams that played the game the right way.

Blevins, who died Thursday at age 82, was an assistant coach at Mountlake Terrace in the school’s first year, but became head coach the following season. He coached until his retirement in the spring of 1977, shortly after the Hawks won the school’s first and only state basketball title.

“He went out on top, I’d say,” said Roger Ottmar, who succeeded Blevins as Mountlake Terrace head coach.

Though the championship was his crowning achievement on the court, Blevins touched many lives throughout his years of teaching and coaching.

He was, said Nalin Sood, Mountlake Terrace’s current head coach, “the patriarch of the Mountlake Terrace basketball family.”

Even in his retirement, Blevins frequently attended Mountlake Terrace games “and he always came down afterwards to talk to me,” Sood said. “I still get chills thinking about that. He’d tell me how proud he was of the guys, how well they’d played and how much he enjoyed the game. That just sort of exemplified the kind of person he was.

“If I could be a tenth of the person Merle Blevins was, that’d be a good life. We’re just fortunate as a high school and as a basketball program to have had him touch us in so many different ways. He set the standard, not only as a basketball coach, but also with his generosity and kindness as a person.

“I’m really just saddened that Coach is not with us,” Sood said, “but I’m so fortunate to have known him and been mentored by him.”

Bob Jacobs, who was an assistant to Blevins from the fall of 1962 until leaving to become the first head coach at Lynnwood High School, said Blevins was “very dedicated to his work and to his teaching.”

“He was very insistent about the boys doing what we wanted them to do,” Jacobs said, “and he wanted them to work hard in practice. So there was no horseplay.”

But after practice, Blevins sometimes enjoyed games of “Horse” with his assistant coaches and players.

He was, Jacobs said, “a fun guy to be with. Those were real good years.”

Ottmar was an assistant at Meadowdale High School when Blevins was at Mountlake Terrace, so back then he knew Blevins more as a rival.

“Merle always did a great job,” Ottmar said. “His teams were always pressing and always aggressive. They were very difficult to play.”

Blevins also liked fast-break basketball “at a time when everybody else was kind of playing slow basketball,” Ottmar said. “So in a way he was ahead of his time.”

On the sidelines, “he was not a real loud type of person,” Ottmar added. “But he was quiet fiery. That’s how I would describe him.”

After some lean years in the early 1960s when Mountlake Terrace was a member of Seattle’s Metro League, the school moved to the Western Conference and became more competitive. Later on, and continuing into the mid-1970s, Mountlake Terrace was one of the league’s frequent contenders.

The Hawks reached the state basketball tournament in 1976 with a team laden with underclassmen. The next year, with many of those same players returning, Mountlake Terrace finished 25-1 and breezed through the state tournament, including a 67-54 win over Richland in the championship game.

“He was so proud of those guys (on the title team),” said Debbie MacLennan, Blevins’ daughter. “They were all really special to him. And that kind of crowned his career because he retired that year.”

Though he left coaching after the championship, he remained “a big sports fan, and particularly at Mountlake Terrace,” MacLennan said.

Following his retirement, Blevins went full-time into a second career as a private contractor. He was building houses until just a few years ago, his daughter said, because “that’s what he loved to do.”

A funeral service is scheduled for 12:30 p.m. Thursday at Lynnwood’s Trinity Lutheran Church, 6215 196th Street SW.