It happened more than a quarter century ago, but Nick Menegas still looks back on the eight years he coached the Post Falls High football team with a sense of enjoyment and pride.

"Just the excitement of that little town," recalled Menegas, who went 71-23-2 as the Trojans coach from 1978-85. "In such a short period of time I got to see a program develop - fortunately I had great people working with me. We just got to see a football program in need of some overhaul succeed quickly ... it was just fun - my best friends were my football assistants."

Menegas, who later coached at Lewiston High, and compiled a record of 201-64-4 in 23 seasons as a high school football coach, on Saturday night was one of five inductees into the Idaho Athletic Hall of Fame, honored at the North Idaho Sports Banquet at the Best Western Coeur d'Alene Inn.

MENEGAS, AN all-city tight end at Shadle Park High in Spokane, was so anxious to get his coaching career started, he was ready to sign his first contract without ever seeing where he was going to work.

Menegas had the odd combination of majoring in P.E. and minoring in art at Eastern. He chose art because he loved it and figured it would be an easy minor.

Equally oddly enough, the Lincoln County School District in Oregon had an opening for a head football, head basketball and head track coach - with a teaching position in P.E. and art.

He interviewed for the job in Newport - a scenic town on the Oregon Coast. He thought he would be teaching and coaching in Newport. He was excited.

"The principal and I hit it off, and I said, 'I'll sign the contract,'" Menegas said. "She said 'Before you do, I want you to see what you're signing to do.'"

They hopped in a car and drove east, 21 miles along Highway 20 to Eddyville, Ore. — one of those towns you might miss if you blinked as you drove through.

“I went, ‘Holy cow, what is this?’” Menegas recalled. “They didn’t even have a football field.”

So his first task at Eddyville was to get the community to build a football field for his team. In between practices, on land the school district already owned — “it was kind of a cow pasture,” Menegas said — volunteers cut down trees and mowed the grass and fertilized. The original goalposts were built from the trees that were cut down. Before that, Eddyville rented a nearby school’s field to play its “home” games.

“It was awesome,” Menegas said of his time there. “Looking back, those two years ... were two of the best years, because we built that field.”

WHILE MENEGAS was in Eddyville, there was an opening for a football coach and math teacher at Post Falls High. A fellow teacher/coach from nearby Siletz had applied for the job without success — actually, none of the applicants were selected, and the school re-advertised it as a football coach/health teacher.

Menegas, who had earlier declined a job as offensive coordinator at a school in Beaverton, Ore., applied for the Post Falls job and was selected. He led the Trojans to six league championships and a state runner-up finish in 1985, his last season.

“My first year we were one two-point conversion away from being undefeated league champs (losing 14-13 to Wallace),” Menegas said. “The next year we were undefeated league champs, and the program was established.”

Back then, Post Falls was in the A-2 division, the second largest of four classifications in Idaho, and Menegas was looking to further his career at a higher level — even though he said he had “such an awesome situation in Post Falls.”

He applied at Ferris High in Spokane, and was runner-up to Pat Pfeifer. Lewiston, which had made the playoffs just once in school history, was looking for a football coach. The Bengals asked Dennis Erickson, who was coaching at Idaho at the time, for a recommendation. He suggested Menegas, who had called him out of the blue after he watched San Jose State, “this small, quick team,” with Erickson as offensive coordinator, beat Washington State at Albi Stadium in Spokane, Menegas said.

“I had the program (from the game), I saw who the offensive coordinator was, and I called him,” Menegas said. “I didn’t know him from Adam, but that would be typical of me ... I see something I like and I call (the coach).”

MENEGAS WENT 117-36-2 in 13 seasons at Lewiston, guiding the Bengals to four state title games and two state titles (in 1993 and ’96).

His teams threw the ball long before it was cool to throw the ball so much. He went to Portland State in the summer of 1977 and studied game film of coach Mouse Davis’ run-and-shoot offense. He combined that with Erickson’s quick passing offense, mixed in some West Coast offense and some screen packages from Brent Pease, and turned football into a series of one-on-one matchups, instead of 11 on 11.

“We were one of the first to break the mold,” he said. “There were games we threw over 60 times.”

Ray Hobbs, a longtime coach at Pullman High, is a member of the Washington state football coaches hall of fame, and definitely from the old-school way of playing football. Shortly after he retired from Pullman, Menegas hired him as defensive coordinator at Lewiston.

“After we threw the ball 64 times in one game, and won, he refused to speak to me the whole way home,” Menegas said.

Nowadays, many teams rely on the pass, particularly from shotgun or the spread. He’s particularly impressed with what Coeur d’Alene is doing these days under coach Shawn Amos.

“I think he’s taken high school football to a whole new level ... to me, it looks like basketball on grass,” Menegas said. “It’s such a high-paced, fast-break offense. I love it.”

He said the difference is, he would speed up the game at times, and slow down the game at times.

“What Coeur d’Alene’s doing, there’s no gray area,” Menegas said. “They’re speeding the game up at a frenzy, and I love what they’re doing.”

MENEGAS RESIGNED as Lewiston’s head coach following the 1998 season, but returned to the Bengals as offensive coordinator from 2000-06. He retired from teaching in 2009. For the past couple of years, he’s written a weekly column for the Lewiston Tribune. Last year he wrote a book called “Innovative, cutting edge strategies to enhance your skills as a coach of today’s athletes,” and he travels the west giving seminars in support of the book.

He took the Lewiston job in 1986 with the intention of staying a couple of years, then moving to a higher level, such as the Greater Spokane League.

All these years later, he still lives in Lewiston, with his wife and children and grandchildren.

“We just fell in love with the valley, and the program started winning,” said Menegas, who turns 58 in June. “My kids got a good education, and I wasn’t freezing in December.

And, “The mill started smelling better,” he added with a laugh.

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on Twitter at CdAPressSports.