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.