Michael Eddy has traveled around the world playing basketball, and has had plenty of geographic stops on his young coaching career.

But the Denton native has always wanted to return home, which is what made his latest accolade all the more satisfying.

DRC/David Minton

Harpool Middle School seventh grade boys basketball coach Michael Eddy was named Texas Association of Basketball Coaches middle school coach of the year.

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Eddy recently was named one of seven recipients statewide of a middle school coach of the year honor from the Texas Association of Basketball Coaches.

Eddy has won back-to-back district titles with his seventh grade boys teams at Harpool Middle School in Argyle, which is part of the Denton ISD.

This year, Eddy’s Longhorns started with a 3-7 record but won their final seven games of the season, including a 42-37 win over Crownover in the district championship game. Eddy, whose team finished with a perfect 17-0 record the previous year, was nominated anonymously for the award.

“It was one of the most rewarding years of coaching that I’ve had,” Eddy said. “It says a lot about the hard work of the kids. It just was a fun year.”

Coaching middle school players might seem like a step down for Eddy, who previously won a private-school coaching award from the TABC in 2007, when he was the girls varsity coach at Carrollton Christian.

He doesn’t see it that way, however. The alumnus of Strickland Middle School and Denton High School, who later earned a master’s degree from the University of North Texas, always has wanted to give back to the community where he was raised.

“I’m very honored and very humbled,” Eddy said. “When my playing career was over, I wanted to find a way to give back.”

Eddy graduated in 1993 from Denton, where he played alongside former local standout Mario Bennett and later started for two seasons and earned first-team all-district honors as a senior.

He played on scholarship at Phillips University, an NAIA school in Oklahoma that has since closed, for two seasons. Eddy earned honorable mention All-America honors during his sophomore year, but transferred to a Division III non-scholarship program at Hendrix (Ark.) for his junior and senior campaigns.

“I knew at that point that I wasn’t going to the NBA, and I needed something else academically,” Eddy said. “It was a better balance of life. Everyone was there for the love of the game.”

After his college career, Eddy spent the next two years playing overseas. He alternated between teams in Iceland and Australia, in addition to playing with a team of Texas players in some exhibitions in Mexico.

In Iceland, Eddy was the only American athlete on his team, which was filled with players who had other jobs on the side, ranging from doctors to lawyers and even a baker.

During part of his stint there, he was a player-coach, which is what got him interested in coaching once he returned to the United States.

“Those experiences helped shape me as a coach,” said Eddy, who also is an assistant football and track coach at Harpool. “Those kinds of experiences made me a better coach. It allowed me to broaden my horizons.”

For example, after the massive April eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland, Eddy relayed his experiences to his history students about how he could see the volcano every day from the island where he was based.

Once he returned to Texas, Eddy found a job as a junior varsity girls coach at Dallas Ursuline, where he stayed for two years before landing at Grapevine Faith for a year and then at Carrollton Christian, where he was an assistant for a year before becoming the varsity coach in 2005.

After three straight playoff appearances, Eddy left CCA when Harpool opened, giving him a chance to come back to Denton ISD. He has since taken over a summer league for middle-school teams that runs at Harpool for four nights each week in June and July.

“He’s just so knowledgeable in the sport of basketball. He knows so many minute details about the game,” said Kenny Howell, Harpool campus coordinator for athletics. “He works well with the kids and gets a lot out of them.”

Now in his 13th year of coaching, Eddy said he hopes to return to the high school ranks again someday, but is happy for now trying to be a positive influence on his young players at Harpool.

“I try to tell these kids that we need to be better every day, and not just in basketball,” Eddy said. “I’ve always tried to use sports as a way to help kids and make an impact on their lives.”

TODD JORGENSON can be reached at 940-566-6871. His e-mail address is tjorgenson@dentonrc.com .