On preps: 'My dad's smiling at you, boys'

There were fewer smiles and laughs than normal Friday night inside the New Prague High School gym. But when a coach dies, so does normalcy.

One week earlier, Jeff Gravon was here in the gym for a game against Waconia. The New Prague boys' coach was very ill and very weak, but he was here. He had left the hospital that night because he wanted to be with his team.

"He was determined," said his friend and now the interim coach, Tim Dittberner.

After that game a week ago, the Dittberner family -- Tim has two sons on the team -- played host to a party for the players and their parents. Jeff was there, quietly chatting with everybody. At one point, he gathered the kids together to tell them they had played like champions earlier in the evening.

"I don't know, he might have been saying goodbye," Dittberner said.

Gravon was back in the hospital the next day, "and we kept thinking, 'He'll get through this. He had made it through so much.'"

Last year, cancer took Jeff's right arm. This week, it took the rest of him. He was 45 when he died Wednesday.

Dittberner, a former coach -- his LeSueur-Henderson team won the 1986 Class 1A state championship -- who is the middle school principal in New Prague, has filled in for Gravon for more than a year, whenever the coach was away for medical reasons.

Dittberner left it up to the players whether to go ahead with Friday's game against Shakopee.

There was no hesitation. The boys wanted to play, because that's what their coach would want.

They gathered in a classroom before taking the court. Dittberner was going through X's and O's when 10-year-old Jordan Gravon, the younger of Jeff's two children, silently walked into the room. Senior captain Sam Dittberner whispered "Jordan," and pulled out a chair for the youngster.

The final pregame words came from senior captain Connor O'Brien: "Coach will be watching us. And he'll be with us tonight."

On the court, there was a moment of silence for the coach before Stephen Gross, a senior on the team, sang the national anthem. A few rows behind the Trojans bench, four little girls sniffled and fought a losing battle with teardrops.

As the starting lineups were introduced, each of the Trojans tapped his heart and pointed to the heavens. Then they gathered in a circle, each of them on one knee.

The Trojans led by six at halftime and the final score, in a down-to-the-last-tick finish, was New Prague 44, Shakopee 43.

As the horn sounded, Tim Dittberner blew a kiss to the sky. Jeff Gravon had been a Trojans assistant for two years and the head coach for seven. In all those years, New Prague had never defeated Shakopee.

Back in the classroom, there were a few tears. Jordan Gravon stood in front of the victorious team, as his father had done so many times, and said, "My dad's smiling at you, boys."

Then the Trojans huddled, each of them with a hand raised in the middle of the circle, and ended the emotional evening with one more private moment. With their coach's son standing in their midst, they raised one more thing to the heavens.

This time, it was their voices: "1 ... 2 ... 3 ... Coach!"

John Millea • jmillea@startribune.com