Nick Nurse, Iowa’s favorite son, returns to the state that shaped him as a champion and citizen of the world

CARROLL, Iowa — It’s a little after noon on a Thursday in August and Carroll National Golf Club is already packed.

The area between the putting green and the clubhouse is small. Still, the space is filled with folks from every stage of Nick Nurse’s life, waiting to hear from their champion.

“I just want to thank all of the members,” said Nurse, who purchased the club in February. “We all know this was getting ready to turn to farmland about five months ago, right? And only membership can keep it going. So I appreciate y’all being here, which is why we are throwing this day here for you.”

The truth is the people at the golf course — and the town as a whole — appreciate Nurse just as much as he does them. Over at Sparky’s One Stop gas station on Plaza Drive, an employee says the 76ers coach is the town’s most famous native.

» READ MORE: Nick Nurse saved his hometown golf course. Now, the Sixers coach is using it to help give back.

Nurse left Carroll decades ago, but he never left his hometown behind.

The 57-year-old often speaks with pride about the city of just over 10,000 that sits along the Middle Raccoon River. For years, he’s been a proud graduate, booster, and visible presence for Kuemper Catholic School. He even saved his hometown’s golf course and used it to give back.

But those who grew up with Nurse aren’t surprised by his loyalty. They’ll tell you Nurse’s small-town roots shaped him and continued to serve as a North Star even as he won European, NBA D-League, and NBA titles. Nurse credits his childhood in Carroll for his success.

“For him to be all over the world and be a world champ, he still loves and appreciates his hometown and comes back to his school,” Kuemper president John Steffes said. “He’s proud to be a Kuemper Knight, and we love that. And he’s so relatable, too.”

Carroll will be well-represented at Friday night’s preseason game against the Minnesota Timberwolves at the Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines, which will serve as a homecoming for Nurse. He coached the Timberwolves’ NBA D-League team, formerly known as the Iowa Energy, to a 2011 title while calling the city home. He also coached at Grand View University in Des Moines from 1991 to 1993. Nurse became the youngest college basketball coach in America when he took over that NAIA job at 23 years old.

The Sixers practiced at Grand View on Thursday. And former Kuemper student Scott P. Alongi, who owns multiple restaurants in Des Moines, planned to host the team for dinner. However, the Sixers players, coaches and staff traveled around 90 miles to Nurse’s golf club for a round of golf and dinner before heading back to the state capital.

“So it’s going to be fun,” Nurse said of the preseason game. “You’ll see a lot of people. All my cousins and everybody is coming. I think the game’s sold out.”

The place that fully defines Nurse, however, is located 90 miles west of Des Moines and sits just beyond a thicket of cornfields. It’s a place where Walmart employees and customers chatted about much-needed rain for the cornfields one August morning. It’s a place where the old 2.5-star Carrollton Inn is the best logging option in the city for passers-through.

The hotel is located across Highway 71 north from the Super 8 Motel and a street over from Days Inn. The town’s lone Starbucks is located inside the Hy-Vee Grocery Store in the CitiCentre Plaza. And the Rancho Grande restaurant on Main Street is packed most evenings. Costumers just have to exercise patience if the road is closed momentarily because of passing trains as they exit the building.

This is every bit of middle America. Pickup trucks appear to be the vehicle of choice and semitrucks haul goods along Main Street. Being here for more than five minutes explains why Nurse is down to earth in a business where it is easy to become flamboyant.

“He also reflects the Midwest work ethic,” said Tom Steffes, a former Iowa Energy owner and standout baseball player who was a couple of years behind Nurse at Kuemper. “Carroll is a hardworking town. And I was amazed, I spent a lot of time with the coaching staff one year [with the Energy], and I was amazed at how much time him and coach Nate [Bjorkgren] put in, everything they were doing. So when he advanced, I wasn’t surprised, to be honest. I wasn’t surprised at all.”

Perhaps Nurse also picked up that penchant for hard work at home. He was the youngest of the late Maury and Marcella Nurse’s nine children. Maury was a mail carrier for the United States Postal Service who became the local postmaster. He also served as the grade-school football and basketball coach, and painted on the weekend for extra income. Marcella was a schoolteacher who taught in a one-room schoolhouse. The educator and singer loved music and theater.

Nick Nurse is a blend of both parents. He’s a self-made coach who has worked extremely hard and become the face of the Sixers. Yet Nurse also found time to become a musician and earned a Ph.D. in sports leadership from Concordia University Chicago. He has performed alongside multiple recording artists, including the Arkells, Mt. Joy, and The New Power Generation.

“Tons of respect for my dad for just figuring it out, you know?” Nurse said. “He kept having kids and kept having to work more. That’s it for sure. I think my dad, one of my brothers would say, was stone-cold honest. He ain’t afraid to tell it like it is, you know what I mean? No [expletive].

“And my mom had a really good way of always having a smile on her face. She could positive attitude a lot of things. And I admire that a lot, because I think I get that a lot. I think even sometimes maybe people think of [expletive] storms around me, and I don’t even feel that bad. I must have gotten that from my mom.”

If he gathered those traits from his parents, Nurse’s athletic ability must’ve been handed down from his five older brothers: Jim (71), Dan (70), Tom (67), Ken (65) and Steve (61).

Tom probably was the best athlete in the family.

“He could throw a football like nobody,” Ken said. “You would play catch with him. Unbelievable. That ball would come in with such a tight spiral, and just zipping through the air. I don’t think he got along with the coach at [University of Northern Iowa] very well. … He was such a good passer.”

Most of the brothers — including Nick — were quarterbacks at Kuemper at one time or another, leading Steve to say he was a wideout because someone had to catch the ball. Steve’s career was cut short in high school because of an injury, but the rest of the family moved on to become star athletes.

“We all knew the Nurses,” Steffes said. “There was always a Nurse boy in the starting lineup for a sports team, it seemed like, for a decade until [Nick] was the last one.

“He was the baby, and you knew he was going to be good, because he had all this training from his brothers and getting beat up in the driveway sometimes. He played a lot of outdoor ball, a lot of pickup. In fact, he’s got a great pole vault story with a makeshift mattress in the backyard.”

The makeshift mattress behind the family’s small home on Elm Street paid dividends. Nurse placed in the state tournament in the pole vault and holds the school record of 12 feet, 10 inches.

Nurse wasn’t just a pole vaulter, though.

On the baseball field, he was the first of his friends to hit a home run. That had a lot to do with Nurse becoming a switch-hitter at age 7. Nurse used his left-handed hitting ability to smash homers over a shorter right-field fence.

In high school, he was a standout shortstop and undefeated starting pitcher. He was an all-state quarterback in football. And he stood out on the basketball court. As an all-state point guard, he guided Kuemper to its first and only boys’ state basketball championship in 1985.

“A lot of winners are confident,” Steffes said. “He’s always had an edge, a cockiness to him, which, again, growing up, playing at the park, he was the best player, and you knew it. You wanted to be on his team. That’s what I remembered.

“He was the star of the class, and that class was one of the best that ever came out of this school, going back to junior high.”

» READ MORE: Sixers’ Nick Nurse happy to be ‘giving back’ to his hometown Iowa school with a basketball camp

With Nurse and Brian David, a 6-foot-9 Arizona commit, dominating for the Knights, Kuemper routed a loaded Waterloo West squad, 77-58, in the Class 3A state championship game.

“I don’t know if he was really better [in one particular sport.],” Ken said. “He was really good at everything. He won the state golf [championship] for his age and went to play in the regional [tournament] for his age and got screwed. Something happened. It was a bad ruling on a shot a guy hit. He came in and won. And they gave this guy two strokes back, which you never do. The reason I’m telling that story is because it wasn’t just football [or basketball]. He was a really good athlete.”

The Des Moines Register must have agreed. As a senior, Nurse was named its 1985 high school state male athlete of the year.

At that time, he was to receive a scholarship to Northern Iowa for baseball and play basketball as a preferred walk-on. But that summer, after he scored 27 points in Iowa’s Dr Pepper All-Star Game, he earned a basketball scholarship to play at UNI, where he still holds the school record for career three-point field goal percentage (.468). He also ended his college career with a streak of 27 consecutive games with a made three, another school record.

After his college career concluded, Nurse transitioned into coaching and took on any job he could find. He remained at UNI for one season as a graduate assistant. Former Carroll High School coach Bill Baddeley then gave him an email address for the Derby Storm, a now-defunct team in the British Basketball League. After emailing a letter, resumé, and press clippings, Nurse was hired as player/coach in 1990. A season later, he took over the program at Grand View. He left in 1993 to serve as an assistant coach at South Dakota for two seasons.

As a way to get more head-coaching experience, Nurse headed back to the British Basketball League to coach the Birmingham Bullets. He spent most the next decade coaching in Europe, leading the Bullets to the 1996 title and Manchester Giants to the 2000 crown. Nurse was named British Basketball League coach of the year in 2000 and 2004. His journey also included a head-coaching gig for Telindus Oostende in Belgium and assistant coaching jobs with the Oklahoma Storm in 2001 and 2005.

Then Nurse returned stateside and led the Energy (2011) and Rio Grande Valley Vipers (2013) to NBA D-League championships. But he’s mostly recognized for leading the Toronto Raptors to the 2019 NBA title in his first season as head coach after spending five seasons there as an assistant.

No matter where he’s been, Nurse’s coaching philosophy has remained the same. His high school coach, Wayne Chandlee, was a stickler for teaching the fundamentals. Nurse goes by — and has won with — Chandlee’s principles and coaching techniques.

“That’s part of the reason Michael got hired at Toronto,” Nurse said of hiring Michael Prenger, his Kuemper teammate, as the Raptors shooting coach. “I really needed an extension of myself in the shooting coach department, because I couldn’t do as much as I wanted to do on the court being the head coach with all these responsibilities.

“And I looked and looked for guys, right? And I just kind of wanted somebody that knew and had the same beliefs that I did. He learned them the same way that I did in the ninth grade from Coach Chandlee. So that’s why we did that.”

Prenger now is general manager of Carroll National Golf Club. But he worked as one of the Sixers’ shooting coaches during last week’s training camp in the Bahamas.

“You wouldn’t believe the fundamentals that we went through,” Prenger said of Kuemper. “We did form shooting without a ball. We did form shooting with a ball against a wall. Then we did form shooting back and forth to each other before we even got to a hoop ….

“The same is true of playing defense. We had to do step slides, and it had to be done exactly the right way. You couldn’t hop. You had to push and gather. It was unbelievable.”

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Nurse has made sure the game is still taught that way in Carroll and uses Chandlee’s drills during his annual Nick Nurse Basketball Shooting Camp at Kuemper.

This year’s camp was in August, just one day before Nurse hosted the two-day golf and music reopening event at Carroll National. He purchased the golf course in February to save it from being shut down.

“This is not a turn-the-key operation,” Prenger said. “A lot of work has been done, and there’s a lot of work to do. But he’s put a lot into it already, just in [seven] months. You could ask any of the members … I bet he said you wouldn’t believe what has happened, just the transformation.

“An example of the transformation, last year they didn’t have water in any of the ponds and they’re all overgrown with cattails. If you go out there right now, they have water in them, and they look beautiful. That’s a huge undertaking to do that. Put effort into it for a clubhouse that was run down and dilapidated.”

No one is surprised by what Nurse has done for the golf and the Carroll community at large. The city of approximately 5.6 square miles is his pride and joy. It’s a place where he learned how to play sports, dabbled in the school musical, and learned how to play the piano and guitar.

It’s a place that will always be home no matter where life takes Nurse.

And he’ll always be Carroll’s beloved son, and, at the same time, an inspiration for those who live there.

“I think one thing that our kids took away from Nick is you follow your dream, like nothing’s too big,” Kuemper High School principal Ted Garringer said. “I’m sure when Nick was in high school, walking these halls, I guarantee if he was like, ‘I’m going to be an NBA coach someday,' people would look at him and say, ‘No, come on. Be realistic. That’s not realistic.’ And I think that’s the example that it kind of sets for our kids.

“You can be from Carroll, Iowa, and you can be a Kuemper Knight, and as long as you are willing to work for it, you can get there. But you are going to have to put in the time. He definitely has a great story on his venture up.”