Hutch’s Steve Eck heaps on wins during a coaching career that isn’t slowing down

Steve Eck has been coaching basketball for a long time and coaching it well.

His record is ridiculous. After a 227-15 record and six state championships over 10 seasons at Wichita South (1986-96), Eck has been nearly as successful during 16 seasons in the junior college ranks at Butler, Redlands (Okla.), Cowley and for the past eight seasons at Hutchinson, where he is 536-94.

Eck’s formula is simple: Get players to defend. Get them to share the basketball. Get them to play hard.

It all sounds so easy, except that if you check, you’ll find not every coach is 763-109.

So there’s something special about Eck and for 30 years people have been trying to figure out just what he has that others do not. Having good players, of course, comes to mind. Tremendous devotion to his job and profession are part of the mix.

“Honestly, it’s been a blessing to play for Coach Eck,” said Hutch sophomore guard Samajae Haynes-Jones, from East, who next season will be a Wichita State Shocker. “I’ve learned so much from him, especially on the defensive side.”

Hutchinson is 18-0 going into a home game Saturday night against Cloud County. The Blue Dragons are ranked second in the NJCAA poll and after coming up one game short for a national championship last season, Hutchinson should be back in the mix in March.

But Eck, who led Redlands to an NJCAA Division II national championship in 2002 and had that team in the Division I championship game at Hutchinson’s Sports Arena in 2004, insists winning a national championship at Hutch, where he dreamed of coaching as a kid growing up in Haven, isn’t what drives him.

“I’m not coaching for that,” said the 61-year-old Eck, who doesn’t look much different from the 30-year-old who showed up at South in 1986 after coaching basketball and volleyball at Jardine Junior High. “If I was coaching for that, then I should get out. And I haven’t won (a national championship) here so I don’t know how much it would mean.”

Hutchinson is loaded, averaging almost 95 points and led by four sophomores. Haynes-Jones leads the Blue Dragons in scoring with 16.6 points but four others are in double figures: 6-foot-4 freshman J.J. Rhymes (16.1); 6-7 sophomore Shakur Juiston (15.1), 6-3 freshman Devonte Bandoo (13.2) and 6-4 sophomore James Conley (10.4).

Eck said his team played poorly Wednesday night, but it still managed to beat Seward 88-65 at the Sports Arena.

“Their best player (Kevin Sims, 22.5 points) didn’t play and that hurt them a lot,” Eck said. “But it’s hard to play hard every night and for our first 17 games we played hard. This league is tough; there’s no other league in the country that plays a 26-game (double round-robin) schedule. It’s tough because every game is a dogfight and there are no easy games in our league.”

Perhaps, but the Blue Dragons have won 14 conference games by an average of 19.3 points and are on a run of 12 consecutive double-digit wins. Hutch has won 25 consecutive Jayhawk Juco games since dropping three straight last season to Cowley, Butler and Dodge City.

Eck, who admits to being fragile in his first two or three seasons at Hutchinson, has learned to trust his ways. Even after all of his previous success, he says he was unsure initially at Hutch.

“I think I was really in awe my first two or three years here,” Eck said. “When you’re a kid growing up in Haven, you think about Hutch all the time, so I wasn’t really comfortable early on. Since my fourth year, I forgot all about that stuff and started coaching the team like I’ve coached my teams in the past. Be yourself and don’t worry about what people are going to think. It took me some time to figure that out.

“I was worrying about too many things, too many outside influences, instead of just coaching my team. I just decided, ‘Hey, you’ve got this job now,’ and what would my dad (the late Rusty Eck) tell me. I know what he would have done those first three years, he would have kicked my rear.”

Eck did get once chance as an assistant at the NCAA Division I level, at UMKC, but it didn’t last long. The coach at the time, Bob Sundvold, was fired and Eck ended up back in Wichita for a season, as an assistant at Newman. Then he started his tour of Butler, Cowley and Hutchinson, establishing himself as one of the top junior college coaches in the country.

Still, he harkens back frequently to those days at South, a 10-year run that hadn’t been equaled before in City League history, and hasn’t since.

“I think about South every day,” Eck said. “I miss it so much and I miss all those guys.”

Coaching has been Eck’s calling and, he says, it has never really mattered to him on what level. He’s about teaching, about the relationships.

And about winning, which he has done at an 87.5-percent clip for almost 30 seasons. Pretty remarkable.

This story was originally published January 20, 2017 at 12:41 PM with the headline "Hutch’s Steve Eck heaps on wins during a coaching career that isn’t slowing down."