After so many relays and TDs, time to hand off

Somewhere in the late 1990s, Arron Deck called the Billings Gazette looking for information on Flathead High School.

He was chasing his Masters in sports management at MSU-Billings, helping coach football at high school alma mater (Billings Senior) and hearing complaints about a certain AA school.

“It was a statistics class,” he said this week. “Don’t ask me why, but when I was first coaching in Missoula, they weren’t big fans of Flathead. Then I moved back to Billings and they weren’t fans of Flathead, either.”

So with the help of a sports writer who kept every high school’s football results in a binder — pipe down, non-nerds — he figured out the Braves’ winning percentage over the previous 15 seasons.

Around eight years later, in 2005, Deck was teaching at Flathead.

This is a long way of getting to the news that Deck, 48, is retiring from teaching and coaching at the end of this school year. He’s been teaching health and physical education at Glacier since the school opened its doors in 2007.

The school has had an uncommon run of coaches, in that it has had one each for both boys basketball (Mark Haskins) and football (Grady Bennett). Until this spring only Jerry Boschee had led the Pack’s girls track team; Christy Harkins stepped down this winter as the only volleyball coach the Pack has known.

Deck is Glacier’s second coach for boys track after taking over for Arie Grey — but that was in 2009. This will be his 14th season.

A quick newspapers.com search finds Deck in the Gazette sports pages … for youth hockey. A top scorer for the Billings Redwings, he thought he might be a college hockey player. St. John’s, a Division III school in Minnesota, came calling (so did Mick Delaney, then the football coach at Montana Western). “But after a couple of camps I came home and I said to my parents, ‘I don’t want to be a college athlete,’” Deck said.

He enrolled at the University of Montana in 1992; by 1995 he was helping out football coach Gary Ekegren at Missoula Big Sky. He returned to Senior as a student teacher in 1997, and coached under Pat Dolan.

While working on his Master’s he taught part-time at Blue Creek Elementary and picked up shifts at that old Gazette haunt, Tiny’s Tavern. Meanwhile his wife, Rachel, was finishing her degree and working at Jake’s Restaurant.

Rachel is a Kalispell native, so it made sense to move West, and it is funny how things work out: Deck cold-called the then-Flathead AD, a guy named Mark Dennehy. He wasn’t sure it did him any good.

“I called him out of the blue,” Deck said. “And I remember hanging up the phone and telling my wife, ‘I could work for a guy like that.’”

Which is what happened. When Glacier opened, he followed Bennett over from Flathead. By 2010 his track team had earned a third-place trophy; the Wolfpack was second in 2013, third again in 2015 and in 2018, state champs.

“I’ve been pretty fortunate over the years,” Deck said. “I’ve worked for some Hall of Famers and legends. Pat Dolan for a year, then Marc Sulser. I moved to Kalispell in ‘05 and have been with Grady ever since. Arie Grey is a great friend. I’ve learned so much from those four guys and all the assistants.”

He’s seen state football championships and near misses, been welcomed by the Kalispell community and pushed three kids off to college.

What’s left? Well, several trips to the Lone Star State have Deck, his wife Rachel and freshman-to-be Emily thinking Texas. A few relays are left, and then it’s time to hand off the baton.

“We like the weather, the people and the food,” Deck said. “And there’s a lot of young, talented teachers ready to go. It’s time to get out of the way and let ‘em run.”

Fritz Neighbor can be reached at 758-4463 or fneighbor@dailyinterlake.com.