Ed Fritz hopes to chase down high school hoops success again, this time at Northtown

It’s been a while since Ed Fritz could consider himself an underdog.

In 19 years at the helm of Blue Valley Northwest boys basketball, Fritz guided the Huskies to five Kansas Class 6A state titles and a total of 677 wins with the program.

Fritz says that he considered his BV Northwest team an underdog in 2016 when he lost the nucleus of a team that went 94-6 over four years and ended the 2016 season 7-17. Any notion of being an underdog was quickly swept aside as the Huskies went 16-6 in 2017 on the way to the first of three consecutive state titles.

But having retired from the Blue Valley School District in late April and taking over the head coach role at North Kansas City, Fritz can now truly consider himself and his team as the underdogs.

“Being in a different role and maybe being the underdog role, that kind of excites me, and I want to get to a spot where we’re going to be tough to beat,” Fritz told The Star.

Fritz is taking over the head coaching role from now-retired Gerry Marlin, who led the North KC Hornets from 2014-21 and oversaw a stellar 2017-18 season in which the team went 22-4.

But North KC has enjoyed just three winning seasons over the past decade. The Hornets haven’t been to the semifinals of a Missouri state tournament since 1957.

Soon after Marlin’s retirement, North KC activities director David Garrison and principal Drew White met with Fritz with the hopes of making a program-changing hire.

“Anytime you think about high school basketball in the Kansas City area, Coach Fritz is a name that immediately jumps out,” Garrison said. “To get an opportunity to visit with him and get to know him, it’s been fantastic. We are super excited to have him lead our program and be a part of our school.”

It took a little over a month between Marlin’s retirement and the announcement of Fritz as the new head coach at North Kansas City. But the sequence of events that led to Fritz’s hiring came about more by happenstance than an orchestrated jump across state lines.

“I was always looking at a new challenge and a new opportunity, and I had a really good run at Northwest and accomplished a lot,” Fritz said. “They have a good team coming back next year, but the timing was just right and sometimes when you see the timing you’ve got to take advantage of it.”

Fritz’s goal is to get North Kansas City to the lofty heights that he achieved at BVNW, but part of the reason Fritz wanted to make the move was that he was almost tired of being so dominant.

Blue Valley Northwest has won five state titles since 2013 and has appeared in the state tournament in 10 of the last 12 seasons.

“I kind of got at Northwest where we were always getting chased and we were always the team to beat,” Fritz said. “Now I’m going to try and get a program where we’ve got to beat some people.”

The 64-year-old coach found it tough to leave BV Northwest, but he’s already met his new team a handful of times and looks forward to what he can achieve with them.

He plans to follow the same blueprint that culminated in a decade of dominance for Blue Valley Northwest by purposely scheduling the toughest schedule possible and not worrying about wins and losses.

“We’re not scared to lose,” Fritz said. “You learn so much more about yourself when you fail than when we succeed a lot of times, so it’ll be a great challenge.”

Junior John Elful has experienced both the highs and lows of playing at North Kansas City. His sophomore year was a good one as North KC went 18-7, but that was followed by 2019-20’s 9-14 season.

The chance to spend his senior year under Fritz excites the 17-year-old, saying he’s “honored” to have Fritz as his final high school coach.

“I’ve heard great things about him, and I’ve heard he’s been doing great things lately,” Elful said. “I feel Coach Fritz is good for us, he’s going to get Northtown right back on track.”

Fritz doesn’t have a solid timeline of where he wants to take North KC and how quickly that’ll happen. What he does know is that it’s going to be a big challenge to get North Kansas City back above the .500 mark. He also knows that he has the team to do it.

“I think they know this is going to take a lot of work, but I don’t think they’re afraid of it,” Fritz said. “That kind of impressed me about the kids, and there are some kids here that could be a good nucleus going forward and I really wanted to try and make the program better.

“I know it’s not going to happen overnight, it’s going to take a lot of work to do it, but I think over next year and in the future we’ll be able to have something to build on.”