For a long time I wondered about the whereabouts of Willie Marshall, who had coached Omaha Bryan’s girls basketball team to the 1981 Class A state title. Today, as I was writing an obituary on one of his former rival coaches, Fremont’s Bobbie Hopp, I came across his name in the archives and went on a Google search.

What I found was that Willie Frank Marshall died almost two years ago, at 71 in September 2010, in the Pensacola area. He had been an award-winning educator in the Escambia County schools and had gotten married in the mid 1990s, with two daughters and two stepdaughters. A video tribute is on YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUJ3NN2Tq08).