Thrash, basketball coach, recruiter and scout, dies at 77

Jim Thrash impacted the game of basketball at virtually every level, from youth hoops to the NBA.

At each level, his contributions made the game better. His basketball acumen was surpassed in that regard, contemporaries say, only by the personal relationships he built along the way.

Thrash, a former Manzano High School assistant and head coach who later worked as an aide to Purdue coach Gene Keady and as an NBA scout, died on Jan. 5 in Albuquerque. He was 77.

At Manzano, Thrash helped the Monarchs win back-to-back state titles (1973-74) as an assistant to Mike Martin. Thrash succeeded Martin as head coach in 1974 and compiled a 66-16 record in three seasons, taking the Monarchs to the state tournament all three years.

Marty Saiz, an Albuquerque insurance agent, president of the New Mexico Sports Hall of Fame and a former AAU basketball coach, was a player at Cibola when Thrash was the head coach at Manzano.

“His teams were always really good, well coached,” said Saiz, who more recently interviewed Thrash in connection with a book on New Mexico prep basketball history that Saiz is writing.

Jim Ciccarello, a longtime APS track-and-field coach (and a member of the New Mexico Sports Hall of Fame, an honor for which Thrash is a nominee), worked with Thrash at Manzano. He also played basketball at Valley High School and knows and loves the game.

Thrash, Ciccarello said, “was a basketball fanatic. He had a lot of basketball knowledge, and he was extremely motivated.”

Yet, Ciccarello said, Thrash was more interested in the people who played the game than in the game itself.

“He was a people person,” Ciccarello said. “He was a positive kind of guy, and when you talked to him, you felt like you’d known him for a while.”

Saiz concurs that, beyond his basketball knowledge, Thrash’s communication skills were what set him apart.

“The big thing with Jim was his relationships with people,” Saiz said.

An Illinois native, Thrash was a basketball standout and a four-sport letterman at Farina High School. He came to New Mexico in the mid-to-late 1960s, enrolling at Eastern New Mexico in Portales after a stint at Thornton Junior College in Chicago. He played two seasons for the Greyhounds.

After graduating from ENMU, Thrash came to Albuquerque and began a career with APS in 1969.

In 1977, Thrash left Albuquerque to work for first-year Fresno State coach Boyd “Tiny” Grant. The two had met at a basketball camp circa 1970 and became close friends.

In Fresno, Thrash became the Bulldogs’ primary recruiter and employed those people skills in bringing future NBA players Rod Higgins, Ron Anderson, Bernard Thompson and Pete Verhoeven to California’s Central Valley.

After six successful years in Fresno — the Bulldogs won the National Invitation Tournament championship in 1983 — Thrash returned to Albuquerque and began a highly successful career in real estate. But he was never truly out of the game, serving as a youth basketball coach and organizer.

Thrash and Martin, his former boss at Manzano, had established the city’s Albuquerque Youth Basketball League in the ‘70s.

Yet, college coaching still beckoned. In 1996, Thrash accepted the head coaching job at College of Southern Idaho, a two-year school in Twin Falls.

Then, Keady — whose relationship with Thrash began with the Purdue coach’s unsuccessful recruitment of Manzano star Alan Zahn in the mid-1970s — finally succeeded in bringing his friend to West Lafayette. In Thrash’s two seasons there, the Boilermakers made the NCAA Tournament Sweet Sixteen and Elite Eight — the latter at the Pit in 2000.

After that 1999-2000 season, Thrash again returned to Albuquerque and began a career as an NBA scout, working first for the Golden State Warriors and later for the Charlotte Bobcats and the Atlanta Hawks, before retiring.

“He just did so much in basketball,” Ciccarello said. “… He had a full career.”

Thrash is survived by Denise, his wife of 53 years, sons Jason and Mark and five grandchildren.

Thrash’s athletic genes and love for basketball were passed on. Mark Thrash played four years of college basketball at Biola University in La Mirada, California. Jason Thrash played at Manzano in the late 1980s.

A memorial service is scheduled for April 20 at Manzano High School.