SOUL & INSPIRATION

Imagine what Eric Dinwiddie was thinking at the Cascade High School football banquet one cold winter night in 1995.

There was Dinwiddie, then 18, minding his own business. His coach, Terry Ennis, spoke to the crowd about several of his senior players. Then he pointed to Dinwiddie.

“I want this person to be a football coach,” Ennis said.

Think of that. Ennis already had achieved status as a resident legend, having built and rebuilt program after program at Stanwood, Bellarmine of Tacoma, Renton and now, Cascade. Still to come: the creation of a championship program at Archbishop Murphy.

And now, Ennis picked Dinwiddie as one he’d hoped would join the fraternity. Ennis thought Dinwiddie had what it took to guide young people, a skill Ennis had mastered for decades.

Talk about your ultimate compliment.

As Dinwiddie tells this story, he has to take time to compose himself. He clears his throat with a wet hack. He stops talking for several seconds. Although Ennis fought prostate cancer since 2002, the news that he’d died Wednesday morning at 63 still was an open wound.

“He inspired me,” said Dinwiddie, who later was an Ennis assistant and went on to become today’s head coach at Granite Falls High School. “I’m a football coach because of him … I graduated high school, then the next year I went to Everett Community College and I was coaching football at the middle school level.”

Ennis bridged the gap between player and coach, even later in his life, when the age differences were greatest. He was an old-school coach whose offenses ran the Wing-T. His teams played with great discipline and always were well-conditioned. On the field, few were as demanding and vocal as Ennis.

Off it, few loved their players as he did.

“He lived to coach and we were all his sons,” said Shiloh Keo, a safety at the University of Idaho.

Keo transferred to Archbishop Murphy from Woodinville between his sophomore and junior years. He and Ennis quickly developed a relationship that transcended player and coach. Often, Ennis invited Keo to stay at his home when it seemed Keo needed emotional support.

An adoring Keo called his coach “Uncle Ennis.”

“I’d hang out with him all the time,” said Keo, a two-way star who was named to the Associated Press 2A All State team. “Whenever I could, I’d go into his office and we’d talk. Most of the time, we never even talked about football. We’d talk about life and how things were going. I’d talk to him about school. I’d talk to him about problems at home.

“He was always the one I could go to if anything was wrong. He was just as much my older brother as he was my coach.”

As a coach, Ennis could get fired up with the best of them. Once, Dinwiddie said, the Bruins had practice on Thanksgiving because they had to travel across the mountains the next day for a playoff game.

The players, Dinwiddie said, had taken a lax attitude about practicing that day, which didn’t do anything good for the coach’s mood. Finally, an irate Ennis jumped into the middle of a blocking drill and ordered Dinwiddie to run through him, full speed.

“When he tells you to do something, you do it or you’re going to be in more trouble,” Dinwiddie said.

So Dinwiddie slammed into Ennis, who, as a former standout player at Santa Clara, didn’t move much but sustained a cut on his forehead.

Didn’t faze him.

“He yelled ‘Next!’ and got right down for the next rep,” Dinwiddie said. “He had such fire. He was bleeding a little bit. He had those eyes and that vein that popped out of his forehead. When you do something like that, you don’t want to make eye contact with him.”

Ennis had many ways of getting through to his players.

He had the forehead scars to prove it.

Sports columnist John Sleeper: sleeper@heraldnet.com