Ed Siegel, Indiana Basketball Hall of Famer and Pike icon, dies from the coronavirus at 87

When Ed Siegel walked into the Pike High School gymnasium for the first time in 1971, no one could have guessed what was to come. 

This was before Pike was a boys basketball powerhouse. This was before the gymnasium bore the name of the man who changed everything. When Siegel took over, Pike hadn’t won anything. Forget state titles. No regionals, no sectionals, no county titles. Nothing.

It’s against this backdrop that Siegel told his players: “We’re going to win a sectional.”

By the time he retired in 1995, Siegel had led Pike to 19 total sectional, regional, county and conference titles.

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Ed Siegel, 87, died Wednesday from coronavirus, according to his children. The Indiana Basketball Hall of Famer’s legacy extends beyond the court. He touched lives. 

"What I knew early on and what I knew until the day he died is that he cared deeply what happened to me, not just from a basketball standpoint, from a life standpoint," said David Wood, the West Lafayette coach who played on Siegel’s first two Pike teams. “He's been like a second father to me. I love him the way I love my father.”

Ed Siegel 'put Pike High School on the map for basketball'

Siegel backed up his confident words with bold actions. His first team lost its first game the day before Thanksgiving. 

“Friday, we had two short practices scheduled before we played Beech Grove on Saturday. We practiced for seven hours,” Wood said. “We weren't doing it the way he wanted us to do it. We weren't doing it his way. We won with a fourth-quarter comeback. Then he had us."

Siegel was adamant that his team was going to do things his way.

“He used to tell us as players that he thought his job was to make us the best conditioned team against any team,” said Andy Pritchard, who was on the school’s first team to win the Marion County tournament. “That's kind of like your dad saying it's going to hurt him more than it hurts you right before he spanks you. We ran a lot of death valleys."

"One day in practice we ran stair laps for 32 minutes because he said we had to go hard for the entire length of the game,” Wood said.

Siegel instilled confidence in his players, making them believe they were going to win.

“I don't know that any of us really thought about winning the sectional. But he talked about it from the first day,” Wood said. “That became something that was important to us. It became a little bit of an obsession with us because he talked about it so much."

Terry Thimlar played on those first Siegel teams. His dad, Hugh, was a longtime Pike coach and an Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame inductee. That makes what the son says about Siegel even more notable. 

"Ed Siegel put Pike High School on the map for basketball. No if, ands or buts about it,” Thimlar said.

'His family meant the world to him'

Siegel came from the Vince Lombardi School of Coaching. His son, David, would know. He played for his dad.

But there was an undeniable softness there, too.

"Dad had this competitive, fiery persona on the court, but as soon as he walked off the court, that wasn't him," Siegel's daughter, Julie Redman, said. "He might have had this persona of being fiery on sidelines, but he was the biggest softie you've ever met in your life."

Siegel began every day by eating breakfast and reading the Bible. He and his family faithfully attended St. Luke's United Methodist Church in Indianapolis. One of Siegel's favorite things to do every Sunday was help people park their cars.

"Nothing glamorous about that," David said. "He enjoyed having a chance to talk to people in the parking lot and having that connection with the congregation."

When David lived in Chicago in his mid-20s, he came down to Indianapolis. He was going through a rough time and needed to talk with dad.

It happened to be the opening night of the state tournament. 

"Five o'clock turns to 5:30, 5:30 turns to 6. I'm looking at dad saying, 'You've got to get going. You have a game,'" David said. "He looked at me square in the eye and said, 'I'm not going to leave until I know you're fine.'"

'It takes a village to raise a youth, and Ed was one of the village elders.'

Siegel’s impact extended beyond his players. He made everyone at Pike crazy about basketball.

“The cheerleaders, the students who felt they were a part of the program, the faculty and alumni who felt they were a part of the program,” Thimlar said. “It's amazing what the man did."

"It takes a village to raise a youth, and Ed was one of the village elders. He would invest not just in his players but in his students as well,” Pritchard said. "He seemed to have a way of looking at people and understanding where they were and how to get them to move in a direction they should go."

Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb, who attended Pike in the mid-1980s, remembered Siegel in a Facebook post Wednesday.

“As his students, we revered him,” Holcomb wrote. “We looked forward to ‘Econ’ class because of his presence, more so than the subject matter of the day. He was a quote machine. One of the last things he ever said to me was, “Holcomb, you could never jump over a dime,” and of course he was right. We always hung onto his every word and wanted to live up to his expectation for ourselves. Besides, he demanded it.”

Laura Yosha, a 1984 Pike graduate, dated Pike basketball star Pete Munson in high school. She struggled in economics class. Siegel noticed.

"I remember that Mr. Siegel told Pete to make sure I was doing well in the class and to help me out,” Yosha said. “That spoke volumes of him."

Siegel was no stranger to tragedy. His son, Mark, was one of 29 Evansville basketball players tragically killed in a plane crash Dec. 13, 1977. In 2002, Ed’s son was selected to the 2002 Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame's Silver Anniversary Team. 

"The honor of this brings back a lot of memories, and I am sure this is something Mark would have cherished," Siegel told the IndyStar in 2002. "I know it means a lot to our family. It's good to know that he is remembered."

Munson was in middle school at the time, and remembers a Pike game against Carmel in the immediate aftermath of Mark’s death. Siegel wasn’t coaching in the game.

"They beat the crap out of Pike,” Munson said of Carmel. “They rubbed Pike's nose into the ground."

Years later, during Munson’s sophomore year at Pike, the teams met again.

"Ed was a fighter, and he wanted revenge on them. My sophomore year, we played at Carmel. We beat Carmel 98-49. It was so euphoric for him."

Munson’s Pike career came to a crushing end. In the sectional, he went to the free-throw line for two shots with the Red Devils down by one point and no time left on the clock. He was a 94% free-throw shooter on the season.

Both shots rimmed out. His season and career were over.

"I collapsed on the floor and I remember (Siegel) in my ear talking to one of the assistant coaches saying, 'Help me get him out of here.' Their fans stormed the court. He dragged me to the locker room. I remember Coach Siegel telling me, 'This will pass, it's going to be OK.' I couldn't even look at anybody."

Even in crushing defeat, Siegel was there for his players.

"He was as tough as they come and had a heart to match it,” Munson said. “When my day comes, I will never have touched as many people in a positive sense as he has."

Bob Knight, Gene Keady and Ed Siegel

Mack Gadis, the 1982 Marion County Player of the Year who would go on to star at Purdue and eventually be inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame, said Siegel turned him into “an all-around player.”

"I remember him talking to me several times after practices, telling me, 'If you run sprints hard, they're going to run sprints hard. If you play on both ends, they'll step their game up.' He made me understand that the barometer of the team is going to be the guy who's considered the best player,” Gadis said. “If that guy's not doing what he's supposed to be doing, the whole team suffers.

"He wanted to be more than a basketball coach. He wanted to be a confidant. He wanted to be a mentor. He was concerned about Mack Gadis as a human being."

LaSalle Thompson was an Indiana All-Star for Pike in 1991. He got to know Siegel in elementary school attending summer basketball camps. In the late 80s and early 90s, he was viewed akin to royalty.

"Growing up in Indiana during the Bobby Knight and Gene Keady era, I kind of looked at him as that iconic figure on the high school level,” Thompson said. “I couldn't wait to learn and grow from him."

Saving Gina

The morning of Sept. 11, 2001, David's wife, Gina, was sitting on the runway at LaGuardia Airport. She was due to fly home to Cincinnati. She called David, distraught.

After hanging up with his wife, David got a call from his dad.

"'I'm on my way down to Cincinnati to pick you up. We're heading out to New York to save Gina,'" Siegel recalled his dad saying.

"We didn't know if there were going to be more terrorist attacks. We didn't know if more planes were going to fly into buildings," David said. "Here he was in two hours, flying down I-74. We got my wife and hightailed it back to Cincinnati. For the good of the family, he'll drop everything and put his own health at risk."

'He was a father figure to so many'

Just because Siegel was beloved didn’t mean he was easy on his players. Quite the contrary.

"A lot of times as a student-athlete, you just want to hear the good things,” Thompson said. “He would always be the first to say if you were doing something incorrectly or if he didn't agree with the decisions you made."

But there was never any doubt that he had his players’ best interests in mind.

"Every player who played for him came away not only as a better player but a better person,” Thimlar said. "All those players, we stay in touch with each other. He was a father figure to so many of the players."

Siegel’s accomplishments go far beyond numbers, but the numbers are worth noting. He won 458 games including coaching stints with Stillwell, Southwestern (Shelby) and Boonville. He coached four Indiana All-Stars, was seven-time CSAC Coach of the Year and three-time Marion County Coach of the Year.

He was inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 2002. Pike’s gym was renamed in his honor, the “Edward A. Siegel Gymnasium.”

His impact goes beyond accolades, plaques, stats and wins. And it will live on, even though he is gone.

"He's a Pike icon. He's forever going to be a part of that community,” Thimlar said. “He's not going anywhere. We've lost him, but his impact is always going to be there."

Follow IndyStar preps insider Matthew VanTryon on Twitter @MVanTryon and email him story ideas at matthew.vantryon@indystar.com.