College Coach Returns Home To Montana, Prep Basketball -- After 13 Years, Edwards Makes Return To Coaching

SHADY COVE, Ore. - Two rafts round the bend and slide into view a quarter-mile upstream from where he sits on his deck shaded from the hot morning sun. About 50 feet below, the quiet, blue-green surface of the Rogue River has been shattered as it crashes through a field of boulders, and the salmon and steelhead often cluster near the whitewater riffle the stones have made.

Three fawns and two does step from a patch of brush and wade into the river's shallows before disappearing into another clump of stubby growth. Later, a covey of quail marches through the same area, and this time, at least, the man does not lift the binoculars that sit on the table before him.

Not that the scene bores him, but it is nothing special.

"Seen as many as 50 deer at one time on the place," Ken Edwards says.

Twenty years have passed since Edwards left Portland State, where he spent six seasons as the basketball coach. It was a time when Freeman Williams, a 6-foot-4 jump shooter with seemingly unlimited range, hoisted the Vikings into the national spotlight as he once scored 81 points in a game and finished his career with 3,249, second in NCAA history only to the 3,667 by Pete Maravich.

Edwards left Portland State in the wake of a players' insurrection and its subsequent administrative fallout, then spent six seasons as coach at West Texas State.

After that, he dropped from coaching and from public view, holed up in this town that sits astride the Rogue River and the Crater Lake Highway, 21 miles north of Medford, 60 miles from Crater Lake.

And now, 13 years later, Edwards is returning to coaching - taking a sentimental journey back to his roots. The one-time top assistant to Jerry Tarkanian has accepted the job as basketball coach at Butte High School in Montana. His annual base pay will be $3,500.

A banner proclaiming "Endless Summer in Shady Cove" spans Oregon Highway 62, which doubles as the town's main street between the "Population 2,135" signs. The surrounding hills here at the north end of the Rogue Valley - where the scrub oak gives way to timber - wear scars from when they felt the bite of an ax.

The board front of the one-story building housing the Eagles Nest Tavern holds a prominent spot on the west side of the street. It is here that Edwards, tired of it all, found a home 13 years ago.

Since he bought the tavern, he has added two more businesses that extend to the north end of the block - a 16-washer, 14-dryer coin laundry and a car wash.

"After West Texas, I was going to take a couple of years off," Edwards says. "I wasn't going to move back to Portland. Hated the rain. I used to drive through this southern Oregon area when I would make recruiting trips to California, and I liked it."

Edwards, 53, grew up in St. Joe's parish in Butte, and the bonds formed in that old copper-mining town on the Continental Divide have withstood time and distance. Twice a year, a group of his contemporaries gather to play golf. And lately, to bemoan the lack of success the Butte High School basketball team has had.

"Third-largest high school in the state, and they haven't even made it to the state tournament since 1990," Edwards says.

"There were about 16, 17 of us who got together in Coeur d'Alene (Idaho) to play golf, and a couple of guys said, `Edwards, what are you doing now?' "

"Nothing in particular."

"Well, why don't you apply?"

He did and it happened, and now he sits here looking down on the river he has come to love and talks of the town he loved as a boy, the town that has drawn him back, although he will not give up this place or the businesses, either.

"What draws me are the kids," Edwards says. "I love Butte so much, love the people of Butte so much. It's hard to explain. Those people don't prejudge you."