This March, Brian and Bob Wood have a good chance at gilding their combined basketball resume.
Brian’s in his fourth year as Mountain Vista’s head coach, succeeding an 11-year run by his father Bob, who is now Brian’s lead assistant as Brian was for him. It’s a father/son hoops bond underscored by daily lunches together in the school’s math department, where both teach.
And this year, the Woods could join rarified air as a father/son tandem to win state as coach/player, then again as coach/coach. Mountain Vista is primed for a title push after losing in the Sweet 16 the past three years.
“For better or worse, I think people think of us as a single entity, and we’ve accepted that since we got here in 2008,” Brian explained. “(To win a title coaching together), that would be amazing.”
The Woods won two Class 3A titles together at Buena Vista, Brian’s sophomore year in 1999 and again when he was a senior in 2001. Brian set the CHSAA record for career scoring along the way with 2,551 points. His college career fizzled due to a thyroid issue, and his record has since been broken, but his fire for hoops never faded.
Neither did his desire to be around the game with his dad, even though other coaching opportunities presented themselves over the course of the decade-plus Brian spent as his dad’s lead assistant before Bob retired after Mountain Vista’s Final Four showing in 2019.
“I just figured, when it was all said and done, I probably wouldn’t be wishing I had 50 more wins, I’d be wishing I had more time with my dad,” Brian said. “So we decided to stay together.”
Bob, who joked he was “a lot better coach when Brian was playing for me,” said he and his son’s chemistry as coach/player translates to them both being on the bench.
“Those four years at Buena Vista, every time I was going to make a change or call a play, he knew exactly what I was going to do,” Bob said. “We’re still on that same page today, coaching-wise.
“We only get into about one fight every couple of years. It’s usually my fault, but that’s all right. The old guy should be able to yell at the young guy every once in a while, right?”
The Woods’ intertwined basketball lives go back to the late 1980s when Brian was a young boy sitting on the bench at Chadron State College in Nebraska, where Bob coached between two stints at Buena Vista. There, Brian fell in the love with the game and learned some colorful words, too.
“We’d go into halftime, and I’d pull him aside and tell him real quick that when he heard what I said, if his mom asked, he would say it was only good words,” Bob said with a laugh. “So yeah, there was a little bit of censoring going on there… at halftime of (rough games), he would ask to come in the locker room and I would tell him, ‘No, you stay out on this one.’”
Bob, long an intense coach, is now more mellow, while Brian has taken over that impassioned sideline role. With a more low-key approach, Bob, 65, has made it a priority to break down film and hold one-on-one review sessions with the varsity players. Brian, 40, said those sessions are already paying off during conference games.
“When Brian starts really getting on the officials, and he might be close to getting a technical, I stand up and start yelling instructions at our guys, to get him back to coaching,” Bob said. “He did the same for me when I was the head coach.”
Mountain Vista, ranked fourth in the latest CHSAANOW Class 6A poll, defeated No. 1 Rock Canyon on Thursday for the second time this season.
The Golden Eagles (16-2, 6-0 Continental) are headlined by 6-foot-8 center Caden Stevens, who leads Class 6A with 4.6 blocks per game. The starting five is rounded out by senior guard Radek Homer, sophomore guard Cal Baskind, senior forward Zach Bowen and senior guard Brendan Diehl.
“The great thing about this team is no one cares about who’s getting the big stats, who is scoring the points,” said Stevens, who leads MVHS with 16.9 points per game. “It’s a system over players (mindset) because we know as a program we’ve always been right there (deep in the tournament), but we’ve never been to a state title game. That would mean a lot for this group to do it.”
Mountain Vista’s made three Final Fours under the Woods, and six Great 8 appearances. While the Golden Eagles need to continue to work on their zone defense and free-throw shooting (Mountain Vista missed 22 from the stripe in an overtime loss to Eaglecrest on Jan. 7), the expectation is that this year’s team will be at the Denver Coliseum.
“We can apply pressure, we have a good inside guy (in Stevens), so if we need to we can slow it down and throw it into him,” Bob said. “We’ve got a couple guys really good off the bounce and penetrating, and we’ve got a couple really good shooters. We feel like we have all the ingredients we need to have a chance to make a run… And we feel like this team is as talented as any team we’ve ever had.”
