De La Salle coach Forbes Lapp yells directions at his team Thursday during the Knights' loss to Blanchet at the Pendleton Convention Center.<br><i>Staff photo by E.J. Harris</i>

There are some cushy coaching jobs out there, but Forbes Lapp doesn’t have one of those.

Lapp, head coach of the De La Salle Knights, rises at 4 a.m. each day at his Vancouver home and drives 13 miles to lead practice at a Salvation Army gym in north Portland.

The school, which doesn’t have a gym, must take whatever practice slot it can get. That means practicing at 5 a.m. – a time that usually doesn’t exist in a teenager’s world.

Despite the early hour, Lapp’s boys show up, jog, run drills and play fierce games of five-on-five. De La Salle compiled a 17-9 season record and is one of eight teams competing in the OSAA Class 2A State Tournament this week in Pendleton.

Lapp, 75, has built a reputation as a crusty disciplinarian who knows how to get the job done. Sometimes his style ruffles feathers. While assistant coaching at La Center High School in Washington, he and school officials had a falling out after he suspended some players. Lapp coached the next two years at Fort Vancouver High School before taking the coaching job at De La Salle three years ago.

The coach, a New York Jew, fit in just fine at the Catholic school. He continued to teach physical education at La Center High School.

Perhaps his disciplined style is a product of his own regimented life. The wiry coach runs two miles almost every day. He swims and lifts weights.

Doctors tell him all that exercise just might have saved his life.

In 2008, the Bronx native endured 42 radiation treatments for prostate cancer. A couple weeks after his last treatment, he ignored a pain in his chest, thinking it was a by-product of the radiation.

It wasn’t.

He finally realized something wasn’t right and walked into a New Jersey emergency room. After an examination, the doctor couldn’t believe Lapp had come in under his own power.

Doctors did angioplasty, installing eight stents in Lapp’s coronary arteries. He lived to coach another day.

He was back to his old exercise regime before long until last month, when he fell off some bleachers and hurt his back, knee and ankle.

The irascible Lapp started coaching at age 17. His career path has a trajectory something like a roller coaster climbing and plunging. He rose from an assistant, then head coach, at New York City’s Stevenson High School to assistant, then head coach of a Kansas community college to assistant coach at Arkansas-Little Rock, a Division I school. He eventually downsized to a coaching job at a small high school in Arkansas before moving west.

This year, Lapp brings a team top-heavy with eight seniors, the biggest crop of seniors he’s had in 53 years of coaching. One of them, Robert Auger, portrays his coach as “a character” who knows what he’s doing.

“I’ve never seen so much discipline,” Auger said. “I don’t care if you’re the best player on the team or the worst – he treats you the same.”

Auger, one of the team’s best shooters, broke his hand five weeks ago and played Thursday night’s game against Blanchet Catholic School with a foam cast. His scoring, lamented Lapp, has gone way down.

The Knights played at 10:45 a.m. Friday in the breakfast bracket.

Win or lose, Lapp will be back. Retiring isn’t on his radar. Without coaching, he admitted, he’d spend too much time watching basketball on television.

Besides, he said, “I like kids.”