Daren Lambert’s chair was always empty. All season long.

He is an active coach.

Whenever Mid-Prairie’s boys basketball team was on offense, he was calling a play or guiding the Golden Hawks as they called their own plays. Defense? No problem. Lambert would be the one dancing down the sidelines, often in his brightly colored suit, waving his arms as the Golden Hawks shut down opposing offenses.

He helped lead the Golden Hawks to a school-record season of 24 wins and a trip to the Class 2A state tournament in Des Moines, but mostly he developed young men. And they developed him. That’s the kind of special relationship which existed for a head coach and his Golden Hawks this year.

Even the son of a coach, senior guard Will Cavanagh, understood that clearly.

“I’m just so grateful that we had coaches who worked so well with us,” said Will Cavanagh, whose dad, Pete, is Mid-Prairie’s head football coach. “They let us learn and coach as players while also giving us the teaching and guidance we needed.”

Joining Lambert on the Golden Hawks bench were assistant coaches Kelby Bender, a two-time All-Stater for Mid-Prairie in the 1990s, Justin Barthelman and Tim O'Toole.

Yes, they coached.

Lambert talked all season about his coaches on the floor. The Golden Hawks not only had four starting seniors and a fifth – Justice Jones – jumping off the bench, but they had a group of seniors who had active roles in deciding what exactly the Golden Hawks were doing.

It’s the dream that every coach hopes for.

“We’ve got like four of them,” Lambert, the River Valley South’s Coach of Year, said after a game earlier this season. “You’ve got Will, you’ve got Justice, you’ve got Carter [Harmsen], you’ve got Jack [Pennington], all those guys that have been in those moments and seen those things. Sometimes it’s football, sometimes it’s basketball, whatever sport they’re in, but they’ve been in those tough situations where they’ve needed to step up.”

And they did.

When Pennington thought that the Golden Hawks should switch defenses in their regular-season win over Monticello, that’s exactly what they did. And they defeated the River South North champs by 15 points.

A smart coach listens.

“Coach Lambert is great at listening to our advice along with using his knowledge to help win games,” Pennington said. “There were multiple times where we overreacted after teams scored on our press, but he told us to stick with it and in the third and fourth quarters we would tire teams out and pull away from them.”

Talk to Pennington or Harmsen or Cavanagh after a game, and you’d have thought you were talking to the coach. They understood the game. They had the vision.

“Success has been earned by them,” Lambert said. “They’ve put in a lot of hours in the weight room, in the gym, a lot of unseen hours. They’ve earned everything that they’re getting here and the success that they’ve had. It’s great to see them getting all the recognition from everybody.”

The season ended last week in a dramatic 46-43 loss to Monticello in the quarterfinals of the state tournament. It was the first state appearance in 22 years for Mid-Prairie, harkening back to the glory years of Iowa High School Hall of Famer Don Showalter, but yet this one seemed to pave a path for the future. That is the legacy.

“Those five seniors have really elevated the program,” Lambert said. “They’ve put it in a position where it’s gonna be in a better place.”

And that place is Des Moines. That’s the target now.

“The season didn’t end when we wanted, but it ended where we wanted, in Des Moines,” Will Cavanagh said. “Lambert is a vital part to our success and he foresaw our trip to state from the start of the season. He is one of the greatest leaders I have ever met and worked with.”

The ending brought tears to Lambert in Des Moines.

Yet, there is tomorrow. As the Golden Hawks’ win streak built up, the gym in Wellman filled with students and with adults and with kids who are in elementary school now, just as Cavanagh and Jones and Pennington were back in 2010 when Mid-Prairie made its last state run.

“When you see the middle school kids and you see the elementary school kids, they’re looking at these high school kids like they’re NBA stars,” Lambert said. “Those are the things that build programs. Everyone wants to be a part of that.”

So maybe, after 39 wins in two seasons, this really isn’t the finish.

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