Competitive edge drives Blade’s success

Work somewhere long enough and they'll give you a gold watch. Bowl a perfect game and you get a ring. Knock down all the milk bottles down at the county fair and they'll give you stuffed bear as big as the real thing.

Notch the 600th victory of an distinguished coaching career? Basketball shaped cookies with your players after the game.

That's how Edwardsville's Lori Blade celebrated after the girls basketball Tigers earned her the milestone victory at Belleville West Thursday night. She expected, nor wanted anything more.

It isn't the pats on the back that have driven Blade through her unparalleled coaching career. It's not even the cookies.

It's the competition.

"I was born and raised to be competitive and that's what I love to do," she said.

The Tigers' win over West made her just the 14th coach in Illinois high school history to reach 600 wins. She stands at 600-84 overall, won consecutive state championships in 2001 and 2002, finished second twice, and has captured 19 regional titles.

Blade, who has split her career between Carrolton High School and Edwardsville, says she never envisioned reaching the milestone. But at her current pace, others are certain to fall.

Of the 14 members of Illinios’ 600-win club, only Dennis Koester, who coached at Teutopolis from 1983 to 2006, has a higher winning percentage. Blade’s current pace of 28 wins per year would place her in the 700-win club within four years and in the top five all-time within seven.

"She puts win after win on the board," said Belleville West first-year head coach Seth Garrett, after losing his first head-to-head meeting with Blade. "She's built the kind of program we'd all like to have and you wonder if that's even realistic. She sets a high bar."

What's easily the most remarkable aspect of Blade's coaching milestone is that it's not the first time she's reached it. Last April, the Tigers defeated Mater Dei on the diamond for her 600th win as a softball coach.

She already was the only coach in Illinois history with 500 wins in two sports. Now she’s the only one with 600.

Rita Menke can attest how hard it is to coach to 600 wins. She is one of the 12 softball coaches in Illinois history to have reached the milestone having won 614 games and three state championships over 24 years at Belleville East.

She has no idea, though, how to get there in two sports, let alone two whose seasons run back-to-back.

"You know there is some overlap in basketball and softball seasons. How do you juggle those two sports?" she said. "I know how stressed I was with one. To coach two sports and be as successful as Coach Blade has been is unfathomable."

Blade wanted to be a coach "since before I knew any better," she said, which is as long as she's been a competitor. She found a mentor early on in Casey-Westfield legendary softball coach Denny Throneburg, who she'll catch on the all-time list with just 40 more wins.

She arrived in Edwardsville via SIUE, where she twice led the softball team in hits and runs batted in and became just the third player at the university to reach 1,000 points on the basketball court. She has since been inducted into the Cougar Hall of Fame.

Her hope was eventually to coach in the collegiate ranks, but found there's nothing else she could want beyond what she's found coaching high school athletes.

It's a passion that shows, says Collinsville girls basketball coach Lori Billy.

"I always thought I was a huge competitor," Billy said. "To go from basketball right into softball like she does is just unbelievable. I don’t know how she does it. It's just devotion and dedication, I guess. We all have that, but she really believes in what she does. She loves it, she lives it and she has flat out earned her success."

Blade, who will be inducted into the Illinois Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame next April, says her success is testament to longevity and consistency, but winning is not coaching's only allure and it's rarely something that's ever achieved alone.

She credits long-time assistant coach Donna Farley for bringing a wealth of knowledge and an alternative view point to the Tigers’ bench. “She should have been a head coach, but never wanted to be,” Blade said. “I’ve been fortunate to have here with me.”

Blade also counts herself lucky for the support she’s received from the players and their families, as well as her own family, many of whom traveled to Belleville Thursday to witness basketball win No. 600.

If she achieves nothing else in her career, though, she says she hopes it would be helping all the girls who have played for her find the competitor in themselves.

"It's important for girls to learn to go out and compete," she said. "I've always believed that because they are not going to go on and play professionally necessarily and make a lot of money, but they are going to need to be competitive in their jobs.

"I hear all the time from kids I see down the road about how they've learned to be competitive and to be a teammate through our program. And that’s what it’s all about.”

This story was originally published December 12, 2015 at 5:30 PM with the headline "Competitive edge drives Blade’s success."