Sometime next spring, when the sun returns and lawns are awakened from their winter slumber, Barry Crust will coach his last game at Hudtloff Middle School in Lakewood.

Crust’s farewell to coaching is notable because Hudtloff is where he began his coaching career in the fall of 1967, and Hudtloff is where he has remained. Crust is the Clover Park School District’s version of Joe Paterno, who is working his 44th consecutive season as the head football coach at Penn State.

Except while JoePa has been associated with a single sport, Crust has been Hudtloff’s man for all seasons: A baseball coach for 42 years, a wrestling coach for 31 years, a football coach for 26 years, a fastpitch coach for 14 years. Factor in a couple of years of basketball and one each for track and volleyball, and Crust’s coaching career adds up to 117 different seasons at the same school.

A coach at a middle school is inclined to use the job as a springboard for a high school position, just as a successful high school coach is inclined to explore opportunities at the college level. But when Crust decided he wanted to be a coach during his days as a student at Hudtloff Junior High School – the term he still prefers – he didn’t allow restless ambition to complicate an ideal fit.

“Hudtloff is the only place I ever wanted to be,” Crust said over lunch the other day, recalling how his yearning to coach was influenced by those who coached him: Jack McStott and Ron Storaasli at Hudtloff, and Dick Mason, Merle Hagbo and Holly Gee at Clover Park High School.

During the months preceding his graduation from Central Washington, Crust was mulling over possible teaching jobs in Waterville and Vancouver, Wash.

“Then came an opening in the Clover Park district,” he said. “I jumped at it.”

As Crust was taking off at Hudtloff, the Green Bay Packers’ Vince Lombardi and the Chicago Bears’ George Halas were still NFL coaching rivals.

John Wooden, behind a 7-foot-2 junior not yet known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, was preparing the UCLA Bruins for a second consecutive NCAA championship in a string that would extend to seven.

Lou Piniella, a Cleveland Indians’ outfield prospect, was trying to break his way into the majors with the Pacific Coast League’s Portland Beavers. Joe Paterno’s lifetime record as a head coach was 5-5.

“The kids have gotten bigger and faster over the years,” said Crust, “and their clothes and hairstyles are different. Basically, though, they haven’t changed.”

But the games have changed, both for better and worse. Crust can recall when girls sports were confined to intramurals, with rules seemingly passed on from the Victorian era.

“About the only track event for junior high girls was the 100-yard dash – anything farther than that was thought to be too strenuous for them,” he said. “In girls basketball, only three players on the offensive team could cross the half-court line. And they could only dribble twice before they had to pass the ball.

“It was all pretty silly, and so unfair.”

Nowadays, even that leisurely staple of girls sports during the 1970s and 80s – slowpitch softball – has evolved into a fastpitch competition that finds girls as young as 6 years old taking private lessons on the art of firing an underhanded fastball.

The kids may be bigger and faster, but Crust fears the concept of the all-around athlete has been compromised by a youth-sports culture that demands specialized talents.

“We’ll have an after-school baseball practice from 3:15 to 5,” he said, “and then the kids are picked up for their next practice, which goes until 7. What that means is I’m not their only coach, so I’ve got to be flexible.

“Take bunting. If you don’t know how to bunt, I’ll show you. But if you’ve learned a different technique from somebody else, I don’t want to waste our time trying to undo everything.”

Not that Crust bemoans the relative brevity of any junior high sports season. To the contrary, he believes the schedule – two weeks of practice, five weeks of games, everything wrapped up in two months – kept him fresh during the three decades he spent as full-time P.E. instructor and busy-bodied coach.

Retired as a teacher since 1997, Crust has stayed at Hudtloff to coach fastpitch in the fall and baseball in the spring. In 2007, he counted six baseball players whose fathers played on his teams a generation ago. If ever the dads can’t remember the details of their junior high baseball games, Crust is happy to fill them in.

“I’ve kept the scorebooks for every season,” he said. “All 42 of them.”

Well, 42 and counting.

Crust’s 43rd Hudtloff baseball team will return two pitchers, the shortstop and the catcher from a group that went 10-0 last year. Which poses a question: Why retire?

“It’s time,” he said. “I wanted to coach until 2010, because that would mean I’d spent parts of seven decades at one school. My first year as a student at Hudtloff was 1957, and I returned to coach in ’67. It doesn’t mean anything to anybody else, but it was a little goal I set for myself. Seven decades.”

By stepping away from coaching, Crust will have more time to devote to a wood-carving hobby that’s turned into small business, “Beyond The Beach.” Crust typically scours the Hood Canal for driftwood and crafts the pieces into birdhouses, canes and other sculptures.

Out of the trunk of his van last week, he picked up a self-made souvenir from a recent vacation in Maui: an artfully varnished walking staff crafted from a stick he found in the sand.

“It’s the kind of gift you give a person who has everything,” Crust said.

“I’m not sure what you do with it.”

The man for all seasons smiled, not needing to be reminded that this wasn’t the season for an impromptu bunting lesson.

john.mcgrath@thenewstribune.com