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Former Norway coach recalls historic win
Kent Stock returns to Belle Plaine to talk about ‘The Final Season’
Southeast Iowa Union offers audio versions of articles using Instaread. Some words may be mispronounced.
BELLE PLAINE — How do you want to be remembered?
That’s the question Sean Astin, portraying Norway baseball coach Kent Stock, asks his players in the 2007 movie “The Final Season.”
It’s a question the real Kent Stock asks his audiences when he talks about his life, his two years with Norway baseball and the team’s 20th State Championship in its final season.
“My life is good,” said Stock at Belle Plaine Area Museum Sunday.
Stock spent 13 years teaching and coaching volleyball in Belle Plaine. It was his first job out of college, and it gave him the foundation for the rest of his life, he said.
Because of the historic last season of Norway baseball, Stock is known as a baseball coach, but he coached baseball only two years in Norway and three years in Belle Plaine.
“I was a volleyball coach for 13 years in Belle Plaine,” Stock said.
In his audience Sunday in Belle Plaine were friends, family and former players, and the coach noted that he teared up when he saw them again last weekend.
St. Louis dreams
Stock always wanted to be a baseball player, he said. He decided as a child that he was going to play shortstop for the St. Louis Cardinals.
In 1971 Stock’s father took the family to St. Louis to see Bob Gibson pitch. Stock sat in the stadium thinking, “This is my future place of employment.”
Gibson was scratched from the game that day, so the Stock family stayed for the next game the following day. They couldn’t find a vacancy in a hotel, so Mom, Dad and three children slept in their Volkswagen in a Howard Johnson’s parking lot.
The next day, Aug. 4, they were back at the stadium to see Gibson get his 200th win.
Stock the student
Stock said he wasn’t the best student. In fourth grade, he was nervous to hear what his parents found out during a parent-teacher conference with Mrs. Blake. His father told him that the teacher said it might be good if he did a book report on something other than baseball.
As principal at Linn-Mar school district years later, Stock told his teachers to let students write book reports about whatever subject interests them. At lease the kids are reading, he said.
No professional baseball team drafted him out of high school, Stock said. But Jim Hayden, who taught in Belle Plaine and coached baseball for Waldorf in Forest City, gave Stock $200 a year to play baseball for the junior college.
Stock finished his stint there and still was not drafted, so he went to Luther College to play Division III baseball.
Stock didn’t have a good attitude, he said, because he was giving up his first dream, to play professional baseball.
So he skipped a few classes and did some dumb things, he said.
While Stock was home for Christmas vacation, his mother received a letter from the school. Stock was academically ineligible to play baseball at Luther, she said.
His mother told him he could go back to college and get his grades up and become a teacher, or he could move home and get a job.
Stock went back to Luther and graduated with a 3.0 grade-point average so he could become a coach and teacher.
Coaching girls
Stock’s first job interview was with Parkersburg Community School District where Ed Thomas, a renowned football coach who was shot and killed by a student in 2009, showed Stock around town.
Stock wasn’t offered the job. The school was looking for a girls basketball coach. Stock didn’t want to coach girls.
Stock’s next interview was with Rich Hobart and Bob Delacey in Belle Plaine. Two days later, Hobart offered Stock a job teaching high school business and coaching junior high girls volleyball coach.
Stock’s parents, with whom he was living at the time, encouraged him to take the job.
It was the summer of 1985, said Stock. He’d never seen a volleyball match. The sport was fairly new in Iowa schools.
“I knew nothing about volleyball, and I knew nothing about junior high girls,” said Stock. He started reading books and watching VHS tapes.
Stock coached 14 seventh grade and 14 eighth grade girls his first season. “I had a wonderful time,” he said.
Hobart knew Stock wanted to coach baseball, but he already had a baseball coach. He did, however, need a high school volleyball coach. Stock took the position and loved it.
“These girls were my daughters,” said Stock, his voice breaking. “They all meant so much to me.”
By the fall of 1989, Belle Plaine was getting pretty good. The girls won the first round of districts, beating HLV 3-0.
Their next opponent would be the winner of the Norway-Mt. Vernon game.
Stock decided to scout Norway. In a corner of the stands at the Norway gym was Jim Van Scoyoc, the famed Norway baseball coach.
“I read the Big Peach,” said Stock, referring to the Des Moines Register sports section, “and I knew about Norway baseball.”
Stock introduced himself to the Norway coach. Van Scoyoc said his assistant coach had just resigned. He encouraged Stock to send a resume.
Two nights later, Belle Plaine lost to Norway in the volleyball district finals.
A week after that, Stock had a three-hour interview with Van Scoyoc in the Belle Plaine Pizza Hut and was offered the job of assistant baseball coach.
The following summer, Norway won it’s 19th state title.
Norway’s final season
Stock had heard talk of Norway school district consolidating with Benton Community, but Van Scoyoc said it would never happen. The merger was approved, however, and Van Scoyoc wasn’t offered a contract, so the coach took a job as Class A pitching coach for the Detroit Tigers.
Van Scoyoc asked Stock if he would lead Norway baseball through its final season.
The team started slow, said Stock, but made it to the state tournament with a 32-12 record, one of the few times the team recorded double-digit losses.
In the championship game Aug. 3, 1991, Norway was down 4-3 to South Clay in the top of the seventh with two outs and two strikes on first baseman Kyle Schmidt. Stock was thinking about what he was going to say to the team after the loss.
Then Schmidt doubled.
Brad Groff also faced a two-strike count before he doubled to bring Schmidt home and tie the game. Norway scored three runs in the top of the eighth to win 7-4.
Making a movie
A few months later, Tony Wilson, a movie producer from Des Moines called Stock and said he wanted to make a movie about him. Stock sold Wilson the rights to the story of his two years with Norway in 1992, but making the movie took years.
In 1998 Wilson had a script which Stock called 100% true, “and it was amazing,” said Stock.
But Hollywood didn’t love it. Eight scripts later, David Mickey Evans was on board as director and Astin was excited to play Stock.
By 2005, Stock was immersed in helping the production team develop the movie. Filming took place in June of 2006. The film was released in 2007 on 1100 screens across the U.S.
People ask Stock how much of the movie is true. He says about 75-80%. One fiction in the film is the love interest created for the character. Stock’s wife didn’t know him in 1991, he said, and she’s not a school board attorney.
“One of the neat things was Sean Astin playing me in the movie,” said Stock.
Astin told him it was the first time ever the real life person is better looking than the actor that played him.
Though Astin grew up in Hollywood with famous parents, he’s “down to earth,” said Stock. “He married a Midwestern farm girl.”
There was a lot of down time during filming, said Stock. “We would just sit around the Cedar Rapids Kernels Stadium.” Stock’s wife, Laurie, and their two daughters and Astin’s wife, Christine, and their three daughters joined them on location and became friends.
The finished film
About October 2006, Evans called Stock and said he had the first cut ready. He wanted Stock and Van Scoyoc to come out to Hollywood and watch the first screening of the film with him.
Stock wondered if he couldn’t just send them a DVD. But Evans insisted they go to California.
Also on the plane from Chicago to Los Angeles was a bunch of guys wearing Notre Dame gear. They said whenever Notre Dame plays USC, they fly out to California to see the game.
When Stock got to LAX, Astin was there to greet him. The Notre Dame fans were thrilled and started chanting Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!
But Austin, who played the title character in that movie, was at the airport for a different movie. One about baseball.
Stock watched the film again, for the first time in 15 years, last weekend at King Theatre in Belle Plaine.
“I was blessed to have two years of my life made into a movie,” Stock said Sunday.
“I’m back home today,” Stock said. “It’s awesome.”
