Garden Plain youth basketball coach inspiring community through health struggles

There is a power locked inside pain that when channeled can inspire.

Troy Zoglman has chosen to fight for a group of 31 small-town girls on the outskirts of Wichita.

Zoglman, 42, has coached Mid America Youth Basketball for a half decade. For four of those years, his body has slowly deteriorated. He has been diagnosed with several life-threatening illnesses, including Lyme disease and the progressive nervous system disease ALS.

Although the illness has taken his jump shot, his walk and his voice, it has not pierced his mind and soul, and the girls see that.

He cannot stand on his own, feed himself or perform many day-to-day operations. He can send perfectly-thought emails using software that allows him to type with his eyes. He has been wheelchair-bound for the past year.

But he continues to coach.

His team, Chaos-KS, has played in nine registered tournaments and placed in almost all of them, including a second-place finish in July. He cannot call out plays or write them down. His wife, Amy, has to translate his sounds onto the floor.

Friday night, Zoglman’s players and their families gathered in a small house where pavement turns to gravel. They surprised him, then thanked him, smiled with him and cried with him.

Zoglman’s condition is not improving, but he has already conquered death.

‘Utter chaos’

Zoglman wouldn’t have shown up for his own surprise party unless Kansas basketball was going to be on the TV – he doesn’t like to miss games.

He has always been a sharp basketball mind. Growing up in Garden Plain, he was a three-point shooter with an intelligence for the game that was well beyond his experience.

His talent didn’t carry him to the NBA, but it took him to coaching. Zoglman has four daughters, the eldest a high school freshman and the youngest in kindergarten. He knew others in or around Garden Plain with daughters near the same age. And they knew others, too. Soon he had a team — a team without a name.

They were a dozen girls from small towns who had never played basketball before with a coach who had as much experience.

“We said, ‘This is gonna be utter chaos,’ ” said Sarah Puetz, Zoglman’s sister in-law. “So that’s where the name came from.”

There were growing pains, but the group started earning some trophies, and as girls stayed on the team year after year, they earned more, eventually rattling off a 19-2 season. As MAYB became more serious, Chaos did, too.

Parents and players said they remember stories of Zoglman getting uncharacteristically upset during games if the score went sour.

As long as his cap pointed forward, it was a sign all was calm. As it skewed to the right, Zoglman started getting more frustrated. If he pulled it to the back, his players knew, “you’re in trouble.” And when the cap hit the hardwood, Puetz said, “You better not make eye contact.”

“They’ve always had nothing but respect for him, before he had his disease until now,” Amy Zoglman said. “And the thing that he has that’s so great when he teaches them, is that he has respect for them. He wants to push them, and they can sense it.”

Above all though, Zoglman wanted the girls to learn to enjoy the game and everything surrounding it. As years went by, the scores became less important than which house the girls were going to spend the night. As Zoglman’s condition worsened, that bond grew stronger. One of his players, Carly Hitt, 14, said watching her coach fight every day has been inspiring.

“You work through it,” she said.

Through the chaos.

A little Zoglman

The faces in the crowd at Friday’s party told the story.

While Hitt’s daughter shed a tear during her interview with a reporter, her mom on the other side of the camera did, too. Five feet away, a group of about 10 players huddled around Zoglman, laughing as they told stories. Across the room, Brendan Rolfs, Zoglman’s assistant coach for two years, looked down at his own daughter and said how sad it .

“It’s scary,” Rolfs said.

But with his muscles failing, Zoglman still had a wide smile Friday night, and that is the message host Annette Martin wanted to reinforce. The girls accept Zoglman as their coach. They listen to him at practice, follow his orders in games. Other MAYB coaches and players have given him the same respect. They go to him to shake his hand after the buzzer sounds. And hundreds came out to a benefit event for Zoglman earlier this year. His body may stumble. But “his mind is 100 percent,” Martin said.

So he keeps on.

The players stick by him as he continues to register for tournaments. They won’t quit on him, and “he’ll go until he can’t,” Puetz said. Trophies have slowed, but it’s not about the trophies. Rolfs said he hoped the girls would see their coach as an inspiration — wishing they could take away a little Zoglman. With the scene in that old, gravel-road house Friday, it would be hard not to, epitomized with a sign next to the team’s awards.

It read: “A good coach can change a game. A great coach can change a life.”

This story was originally published December 30, 2017 at 1:46 PM with the headline "Garden Plain youth basketball coach inspiring community through health struggles."