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In the small town of Cabot, everyone knew Will Voigt long before the rest of the state embraced him as coach of the Vermont Frost Heaves, 2007 champions of the American Basketball Association. Everyone knew him when he coached the Ulriken Eagles in Norway for three years, and when he was assistant coach for two NCAA teams, and before that working with coach Gregg Popovich for the NBA champion San Antonio Spurs.

Before all of that coaching and scouting all over the world, Will Voigt, now 31, was mostly a typical small-town kid who did a little of everything: every sport and every other school activity. What set the young Voigt apart was his desire and pursuit of perfection. While members of the Frost Heaves play with a

Voigt-like intensity on the court, their mentor exceeds it on the sidelines. His arms wave as he works the officials, the team and, without knowing it, the crowd. He barks in disagreement with calls, and shouts encouragement to his players. By game’s end the voice is old, and crackling hoarse.

If they have won, he and the crowd leave happy. If they’ve lost, both fan and coach feel the cold outside more than normal. The difference is that while the fans will eventually go to sleep, Voigt may not. At the very least, he will be watching game video or perhaps the piles of scouting video to try to find new talent, a missing piece of the puzzle.

No matter how much sleep he gets, Voigt will likely be up early the next morning, meeting the team at the gym for their individual workouts, and then again in the afternoon for the regular team practice. The ranting and raving and cajoling of the night before will be replaced by methodic teaching and careful coaching.

The path to leadership

Both Ellen Bryant Voigt, a former Vermont State Poet and teacher, and Fran Voigt, co-founder of the New England Culinary Institute, feel that the small community of Cabot was the key to their son’s development. Everyone agrees that in a bigger school (his senior class at Cabot had 18; Will was valedictorian) he likely would not have done all that he has done.

“The great thing about a little school is that no one can hide,” Ellen says. “This school pushed him a lot in terms of leadership.”

Fran adds: “I grew up in a small town and in small towns the whole town has greater expectations of its better students. It’s hard to articulate what values are part of a small town that you don’t realize until you are gone.”

Fran was not allowed to participate in sports as a high school student (his German parents thought it frivolous), and Ellen was never an athlete.

In a small community though, sports, organized and otherwise, are as much a part of the landscape as the heifers that graze across from the Voigts’ 1826 home.

While Will’s father was starting the New England Culinary Institute, his mother taught at MIT. Fran was at home to raise the children, but in small-town tradition, Will was often in the care of neighbor Blanche Lamore.

Will was already a soccer player and a promising pianist when Fran put up a basketball backboard in the barn.

“I didn’t know how high it was supposed to be, so I just put it up and asked Will,” Fran recalls. “He said it looked all right. I think it’s a little high.”

It’s still there, still high, with a bird’s nest built on the flat metal piece in back of the hoop. The barn seems the perfect place for casual basketball, with a floor too uneven to count on a good bounce, and the walls too close to shoot anything but a layup from the sides.

Ellen spent almost all of Will’s high school years keeping the books for whatever game was in season, but both parents pushed their son and daughter, Dudley, to engage their minds.

Will spent more than 12 years practicing the piano with the same intensity and dedication that he pursued sports, but by his early teens, sports were taking over.

“He went through the normal thing (with the piano) at 13 or 14, ‘grumble, grumble, grumble, why do I have to do this?’ ” Ellen says. “We said, ‘You don’t, but you have to do something other than sports.’ ”

So the piano continued until graduation and even Will, who tends to downplay his abilities, admits that he was “pretty good.”

“He was very bright, very talented, a good reader and a good performer,” says piano teacher Richard Shadroui. “There is a link. There is symmetry and finesse in music that applies to sports.”

By high school’s end in 1994, he had decided on a course, a course that took him on a circuitous route across the country, to the NBA and Division I and II basketball, overseas to Norway and, finally, back to Vermont.

The first step was to get out of town, to get to college in California, and to change from Willy to Will. At Pomona he played soccer, but before he graduated with a degree in political science, he served an internship with the Los Angeles Clippers. He returned to Vermont and, with the NBA players on strike, coached the Thetford Academy boys soccer team.

With the strike settled he returned to another internship in Los Angeles, and resumed coaching basketball, including professional players trying to make the NBA.

The NBA career was supposed to stop next in San Antonio for a spot in the player personnel department with the newly crowned NBA champion Spurs. That move was interrupted when Thetford asked him to come back to coach soccer again, to help ease a difficult transition after the death of one of his players from the previous season.

The Spurs approved his delayed arrival, but he made it back to San Antonio by their opening night with an unexpected new job: assistant video coordinator, a fairly high-profile position for a relative neophyte.

“It never occurred to me that I couldn’t do the job,” Will says. “That may be a small-town thing.”

One year later he was the head video coordinator, breaking down video and working with the coaching staff to develop game plans. Then it was off to the University of Texas and Metropolitan State College in Denver for two years of coaching college ball.

Seemingly from out of nowhere he got a call in the summer of 2003 from a professional Norwegian team looking for a coach. “Nowhere” turned out to be former Cabot coach Steve Pratt, who recommended Voigt to a coaching agent.

The Heaves rise up

Sometime in the spring of 2005, Sports Illustrated basketball writer Alex Wolff wrote a story about the minor league ABA. That story ended with his realization that for a small fee, he could build a franchise in his adopted home state. With the magazine’s blessing and (non-monetary) support, Wolff began to build the Vermont Frost Heaves to begin play in 2006.

One of the first chores was to hire a coach. After narrowing the field of candidates to two choices, Wolff asked members of the Heaves online community, the Bump in the Road club, to make the final selection, and Vermonters picked Voigt in a landslide victory.

It was time to come home. Voigt set up his new residence in Burlington to begin assembling his team. He now considers himself more urban than rural, and his life is spent in a different small community, a worldwide coaching community that has surprisingly few members.

“My connection with the town has changed,” Voigt says. “The big part of a small town is the people, your friends. I have more of a connection now with Vermont. Vermont has underlying principles that I see all around the state, even in Burlington.”

The old and the new communities met in the summer of 2006 in South Burlington as Voigt tried to put together a team. High school friends helped with the selection process with former teammate Billy Waller coaching and Scott Caulfield, who grew up playing against Voigt and designed conditioning programs for his Norwegian team, handling the players’ fitness. Mike Osborne, another high school hoop pal and current basketball coach at Johnson State College, came to help coach the tryout teams.

The small-town feel with the big-time talent continued through the season as the team won and won and won. Carl Parton, from Twinfield High School and another basketball buddy, worked the public address system like a pro. He was there because he had always done that as he and Will were growing up. Piano teacher Shadroui twice sang the national anthem, and so on.

“I am who I am because of these small communities,” Voigt says.

This spring the team and Voigt won the ABA championship and celebrated with a parade in Barre. The Frost Heaves won under the leadership of Voigt. He inserts himself into the game with an aggressive sideline presence. Part of it is strategy, to try to pump up his team and work on the officials to call things his way.

But the near constant interplay with the officials also reflects a solid sense of right and wrong, with an absolute commitment to what is right.

“Sometimes he will say the performance has a role in coaching,” Ellen says of her son’s sideline histrionics. “But it’s also his involvement in the game, his love of the game and his love of the rules. It’s almost a moral thing. To not play the game by the rules … he’s offended.”

Making the big play

It’s a July evening in Burlington, and Voigt, after a spring that included scouting trips to Africa and Europe, has settled back into Burlington. He’s still on the hardwood, though, playing on a men’s league team along with three of his Frost Heaves players plus assorted acquaintances.

Asked how the coach shapes up as a basketball player, one of his teammates (not one of his players) said he’s “about like you would expect. He wants the ball all the time and he’s always trying to make the big play.”

Watching the game it becomes obvious who is in control, even though Voigt is not the most physically gifted player on the court. In the second half, with his team ahead by 20 points, Voigt engages one of the referees in a (literally) running discussion about the rules being used. He doesn’t win the argument, but he doesn’t give up.

“I’ve had great people all through my life who have taken the time to help me develop,” Voigt says. “Whether it’s fate, or blind luck, or whether I did pursue it correctly, I’ve worked with great people.”

The Frost Heaves play home games at Barre Auditorium and Memorial Auditorium in Burlington. For tickets, call (802) 860-0082. For updated schedule and more information, visit www.VermontLife.com.

View this article as a PDF of the actual magazine pages.

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