LONE TREE

Brent Nelson is standing underneath a hot sun on a summer afternoon in Lone Tree, wearing a Lone Tree wrestling shirt.

It’s a hammock in the back yard kind of a day.

Instead, he’s standing just feet, really just inches, away from Lone Tree’s defensive linemen as the Lions offense runs plays called by head coach Joe Donovan.

“Gotta get that power to the ground!” Nelson shouts.

Every play is a test, every play is an examination. Nelson is the instructor and the exam scorer at the same time.

A year ago, he was a dad in the stands. Now? Just call him Coach.

This year, his son, Tate, is a freshman on the varsity squad.

“I’m going to be here anyways, so I might as well try to …,” Nelson said, his thought breaking off.

“It’s very satisfying just to be able to try to spark that competitive nature out of kids and stuff like that,” he said. “Sometimes I’m not their best friend, but right when you see that fire lit, just stand back and it’s just a self-sustaining entity with those guys.”

Nelson would know.

He was a high school football player in Cedar Rapids when his own fire was lit more than 20 years ago. There was no college football scholarship for him in 2000 when he graduated Kennedy High School, but there was a promise at Iowa State University. Basically, it goes like this: walk on, kid, and we’ll find a spot for you.

So Nelson got to work.

It’s in the details. He paid attention to the little things that he tells the Lone Tree kids now. Transfer your body weight to your left leg. Push off. Footwork, footwork. Protect your knee. I blew mine out.

By the time Nelson’s third year at Iowa State arrived, following long days of serving as a scout team player in practice, his redshirt sophomore season, Nelson had switched to the defensive line. The promised scholarship came with it.

The work paid off.

And then came a knee injury, a meniscus injury, the kind of thing that sends football players off into the sunset every year.

“You try to get back as fast as you can,” Nelson said. “But when I came back, it just wasn’t what it was before.”

Nelson finished out his college career at Northern Iowa and then it was on to life. He runs a business in Nichols, east of Lone Tree. He married Samantha Sexton, a Lone Tree High School alum. Tate, 15, is his oldest child. Daughter Jolene will celebrate her 10^th birthday September 9 and Beau is 6.

“We always wanted to raise our kids in a small community,” he said.

And he never forgot what took him to Iowa State, what got him a spot on those major college football sidelines.

“I was very fortunate in my athletic career through middle school, high school, even in college, as to where you come across a lot of great mentors and coaches that kind of help you develop as a person, not just as an athlete.”

And now, Nelson is that mentor with a strong message.

“You’re always going to get knocked down, but you have to get up physically and mentally,” he said. “Hard work reveals your character. Keep pushing ahead.”

As the Lions pushed themselves through a hot summer’s day practice one day last week, a group of young kids were on another field with a volunteer coach. The moment was not lost on Nelson, who began coaching not as much to coach as to be around his kids. Be a dad.

“I started over there with wrestling dads and stuff like that,” he said. “Volunteer coaching with my son, through wrestling and football. As he’s getting older and stuff, you start to see some of the more organized sports, where there’s always a need for good coaches to be available, keep the programs moving forward.”

He had helped out with Lone Tree’s junior high program while Tate was there. This year, he went to football summer camp one day, then called Donovan the very next day.

“He showed up like day two of camp and watched,” Donovan said. “The next day, he contacted me. He said, what I saw is a lot of the same stuff I’m used to when he was playing.”

And what the Lions got was a jovial guy who also has his intense moments. Miss a move, miss a block, and you’ll hear about it.

“It’s always good when you get into the bad cop, good cop things,” Donovan said. “I don’t always like to be the bad cop. So it’s kind of nice he doesn’t mind that role sometimes.”

“With those guys, we try to get them to have that aha moment,” Nelson said. “When they do something that is just technically sound and it seems effortless to them, you try to get them to encapsulate that moment. Just be able to repeat that day in and day out.”

The aha moments are coming.

News columnist Paul Bowker can be reached at bowkerpaul1@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: @bowkerpaul