Danny Sprinkle's family name is written in UW — and Seattle — history
His dad played football at Washington. The Sprinkle name runs even deeper.
They sat in the son’s home to watch the father’s alma mater, just the two of them, a memory Bill Sprinkle will cherish forever, even if a national championship eluded his Washington Huskies that night. He played there in the 1960s. Years later, he would drive his son, Danny, the middle of his three children, from their home in Helena, Mont., to one game each season at Husky Stadium.
Even after so many decades and multiple renovations, Bill, now 77, feels the hair on the back of his neck stand up when he walks in.
“It’s kind of a primeval-type visit when I go there,” he said. “You look at the past and see all the buried souls, if you will, that are in your memory.”
Though Danny never lived in Seattle or attended the school, he grew up rooting for the Huskies, wearing purple and hanging UW posters on his walls. “He was all-consumed by it,” Bill says. And so he wouldn’t have missed Michael Penix Jr. and Rome Odunze taking on Michigan for a national title, even if, as they watched the television together in the basement of Danny’s home in Logan, Utah, father and son never broached the subject of Danny some day coaching the UW men’s basketball team.
Instead, it was an evening meant for indulging in their shared pastime, however prescient that scene might feel today.
“We didn’t really talk about the future at all,” Bill said. “Just talked about the present, and how lucky we were to be doing what we’re doing. It was just that kind of night — sit around and BS. He was happy about doing that with his dad. That was a good night.”
Not three months later, Bill and his wife, Danette, accompanied Danny on a private jet ride to Seattle, where the parents sat in the front row with their oldest daughter, Erin, a Seattle resident, to watch Danny be introduced as the Huskies’ new coach.
He grew up in Montana, then played and eventually coached at Montana State. He takes pride in representing that state wherever he goes.
Given his father’s history, Danny considers the UW job something of a homecoming, too. He admits that he left more than one Montana State or Utah State football game early so he could watch the Huskies.
“Probably as close as you could possibly get to your alma mater,” he said.
The Sprinkle name already is written in Seattle history, if you know where to look. One of Bill’s uncles, Dick Sprinkle, similarly lettered as a football player at UW from 1948-50 — overlapping with the great Hugh McElhenny — but is more widely remembered for his career as the original valet at Canlis restaurant. Dick Sprinkle became a Seattle dining icon by matching cars to their owners, strictly by memory, for some four decades. MSNBC once described him as a “valet-parking savant” whose photographic memory allowed the restaurant to operate without handing out tickets.
Another of Bill’s uncles, Don Sprinkle, was elected King County Sheriff before he died from a heart attack, at age 47, in 1963. As a hobby, Don also coached the semi-pro Seattle Ramblers football team — originally the Rainier Beach Athletic Club Ramblers — for 15 seasons. Dick even played for him after college. Don had attended Queen Anne High School and received a football scholarship to Oregon in 1935, but left after his freshman year to move home and help his family. A book titled “Take a Lap,” published in 1989, chronicles his time coaching the Ramblers, who at the time were the closest thing Seattle had to a pro football team.
Bill was born in Seattle, too. He settled in Montana, where he became a three-sport star at Great Falls Central High School, and was eventually inducted into the state’s high-school athletics Hall of Fame.
Still, he says, when it came to choosing a college, “I was kind of a Seattle guy. It was fun for me to go there. That was kind of my first pick.”
He even turned down Notre Dame and legendary coach Ara Parseghian. Bill visited South Bend as a high-schooler, but was told the Irish didn’t have a scholarship available for him. Maybe six weeks later, an assistant called and said there was an open scholarship, after all, but Bill told him that he planned to attend Washington, which had played in three Rose Bowls under coach Jim Owens in the five seasons prior to his enrollment, including a 17-7 loss to Illinois his senior year of high school.
Bill remembers the coach persisting: “They can’t play football there. You need to be at Notre Dame.”
Bill replied: “I really don’t. Thanks anyway.”
“I just had to go to Washington,” he said. “There was no doubt. It was pretty well set.”
He severed his Achilles tendon as a third-year sophomore in 1966, but recovered to become a starting defensive back in 1967 and 1968. Bill Sprinkle played both safety and cornerback. He tackled O.J. Simpson and played against UCLA’s Gary Beban and Stanford’s Jim Plunkett, all Heisman winners. As a senior, he shared the secondary with Al Worley, who set the NCAA record that season with 14 interceptions, though the Huskies finished 3-5-2.
Bill left UW without experiencing a Rose Bowl, but he also left with a reputation. Once, when Danny was playing golf in Whitefish, Mont., and the loudspeaker announced his group to the tee, another golfer asked if he was related to Bill Sprinkle. The man used to be a Washington assistant coach. He told Danny: “Your dad is the toughest player I’ve ever coached.”
High praise, if not breaking news.
“I’ve had like three or four people come up,” Danny said, “and they’re like, ‘your dad knocked me out of a game. He knocked me out cold in high school.’”
It made Bill a member of an elite club at Washington — the group deemed “110 percenters” by defensive coordinator Tom Tipps, who, like Owens, had coached the famed “Junction Boys” under Bear Bryant at Texas A&M. For a time during Owens’ tenure, UW’s toughest, hardest-working defensive players were awarded purple helmets to wear during games as a badge of honor.
Bill earned one during his junior season.
Like his dad, Danny played football in high school — a patellar tendon injury nixed his senior season — but “he was just a magic basketball player,” Bill said, making all-state twice at Helena High. A year later, he was the Big Sky’s top freshman, and eventually left Montana State as the most prolific 3-point shooter in school history. Danny returned to his alma mater as an assistant, then again as head coach, and cemented his local legend status by leading the Bobcats to two NCAA Tournament appearances in four seasons.
In his only season at Utah State, Sprinkle led the Aggies to this year’s tourney and a first-round victory over TCU, before Purdue and star center Zach Edey steamrolled them by 39 points. A week later, Erin jokes that she’s still hoarse from trying to will her brother’s (former) team past the indomitable Edey.
The middle of Bill and Danette’s three children, Danny was “the peacemaker, always,” Erin said, a description she knows might be at odds with his fiery sideline demeanor. “I always say I wish I was as nice of a person as Danny is,” she said. “He truly is a really kind person, and he’ll do anything for anybody.
“There are not a lot of pretenses with him. He just kind of is who he is.”
Before he led two different schools to the NCAA tournament, Danny was the little brother sleeping on Erin’s couch in Los Angeles, between assistant jobs after Cal State Northridge had fired longtime coach Bobby Braswell, driving an old Ford and shopping at Goodwill. Danny landed on the staff at Cal State Fullerton, where he worked six seasons — and upgraded to a one-bedroom apartment in Brea — before Montana State made him head coach in 2019.
“I haven’t been handed nothin’,” he said, “and I’m proud of that.
“He’s just not going to fail,” Bill said. “He never failed in sports or schoolwork or whatever, and he never failed to shovel the walk when he needed to, or rake the lawn. He just was always a doer.”
Bill coached, too. It’s why Danny was born in Pullman, in October 1976, when his dad was an assistant at the University of Idaho, prompting Danny’s remark at his intro presser: “I’m not from Pullman — I was born in Pullman, that’s it. I didn’t have a choice where I was born, and my dad is still pissed off about it.” The family moved to Montana a little more than a year later, and Bill became a high-school teacher and coach, then an administrator for the state’s high-school athletics association. He also served as an evaluator for Big Sky Conference officials.
Danny says even as he embarked on his own coaching career, his dad never related any desire for him to coach at Washington. Bill has never been one to pry.
“I was never pressured to play sports. I was never pressured to coach,” Danny says. “He’s just always been there for me. I’m sure it’s probably been a dream of his, kind of like it was mine, but we never really talked about it.”
He does say of his sisters, Erin and Lacey: “I know they manifested it. They wanted it to happen.”
Erin works at Amazon and lives downtown. She, too, is a product of her father’s UW allegiance. “I don’t know if we had much of a choice,” she said. “We just were born in purple and gold.” Like Danny, her childhood was spent on fields and in gymnasiums, following dad around as he helped organize high-school events.
Sitting with her parents at that first press conference, it finally started to sink in that her little brother is going to coach the Washington Huskies.
“I couldn’t stop crying for probably the first five minutes,” she said.
“I think any of these elite jobs would have been a special experience to be there in the room, and to see the press and everything. But for it to be Washington was an extra level of special for our family.”
Not long after his son finished addressing the media, Bill was already engrossed in conversation.
An old teammate wanted to say hello.
— Christian Caple, On Montlake
Just a fantastic article
Looking forward to some new life with the basketball program. Hop was a great guy off the court, sounds like Sprinkle is as well. Hopefully that’s where their similarities end, because I’d love to see UW win and be in the tournament again.