NATCHITOCHES – Regardless of whether the distance is the 102 miles between her Baraboo, Wisconsin, hometown and her college home of Dubuque, Iowa, or the 1,167 miles between here and Youngstown, Ohio, Erin Crane and her family stay bonded through basketball.
 
More specifically, basketball stands as a taut link between Crane, a first-year Northwestern State women's basketball assistant coach, and her brother, Andy, and their father, Dave, as Erin and Andy followed Dave's footsteps and became basketball coaches.
 
"I was always in the gym with him growing up," Erin says of her childhood, which was spent watching Dave coach at high schools in Illinois and Wisconsin before taking the head coaching job at Wisconsin-Baraboo/Sauk County.
 
"He had been a high school boys assistant coach before he got the college job. He was a full-time high school teacher too. It became too much to do both. Then the girls job opened up as I was entering high school, and he became my head coach."
 
Dave Crane lovingly refers to his and his wife Anne's three children as "gym rats." Despite having them at his hip throughout their childhood, he says he never set out to raise a family of coaches.
 
Instead, Andy, in his fourth season as an assistant coach and recruiting coordinator at Youngstown State, and Erin took on what became an unintentional family tradition.
 
"I wanted them to live their own lives," Dave says. "They were around a lot of good things in basketball, baseball and softball. They all participated in a lot of sports. When I went to practice, they were in the gymnasium. They were hanging around the players. It was a great environment to grow up in. I never thought about it from that perspective (of being a family tradition)."
 
What Dave Crane may not have realized at the time was every win and every loss, every long road trip, every "thank you, coach" from a player helped shape the career paths his two oldest children took.
 
"When you're a coach's kid, you see both sides of it," Erin says. "You see the positives. You see winning games and having fun with the team, but you see the very negative side of it. You're busy 24/7, especially during the season, or you're out recruiting all the time when you're not at practice or games. There's time away from the family, especially during the holiday season."
 
Erin weighed the pros and cons she saw during her father's coaching tenure – Dave is now retired from coaching – and made the decision to remain involved with basketball once her playing career concluded at the University of Dubuque.
 
Much like her father, who credited his high school baseball coach Bill Girling with helping guide him into coaching, Erin's career path was positively affected by one of her coaches.
 
"My college coach, Mark Noll, is really connected in the Midwest," Erin says. "He runs the most successful AAU program in Wisconsin. He hooked me up with a GA position (at Northern State in South Dakota) after college. From that point on, I took it more seriously as a potential career choice, and it's snowballed into a nice little career for me so far."
 
After finishing her graduate assistantship at Northern State, Erin spent one season there as a volunteer assistant coach before landing her first full-time assistant position at Saint Mary's (Minnesota).
 
Both Northern State and Saint Mary's are lower-division schools – Northern State competes in Division II; Saint Mary's in Division III – which come with a different set of rules and regulations than at the Division I level.
 
As Erin prepared to make the transition, she had a built-in sounding board/guide along the journey in Andy, her four-years-older brother.
 
"I've called him with a lot of different questions on paper-work type stuff," Erin says. "What do you guys do for official visits, for unofficials? He's helped me with contact periods; how often you contact a kid. He's given me a lot of tips to use."
 
It was Andy's connection to first-year Northwestern State head coach Jordan Dupuy that helped Erin find her way to Natchitoches and her first Division I assistantship.
 
She soon added the recruiting coordinator title, which led to even more back-and-forth phone calls between her and her older brother and a strengthening of their sibling bond.
 
"It's not that we weren't close before," Andy says, "but it definitely has improved the relationship. There's a lot more to talk about now. We're doing similar things on a day-to-day basis. It's her first go-around with it. I've tried to point her in the right direction."
 
While Andy has been Erin's in-season advisor, it was Dave who performed the traditional fatherly task of offering career advice to his daughter.
 
"He thought it was a good idea," Erin says of her moving into coaching. "He also said you have student loans, you need to make some money. Get yourself well-connected, and you need to be at the right place. Work as hard as you can and move on up as quickly as you can."
 
Erin's career path is trending in an upward, quickly moving progression, one that has combined skill and fortunate timing.
 
"My brother's a big reason why I'm here," she says. "He had connections to (Northwestern State head coach) Jordan (Dupuy)."
 
Those connections, which included a well-timed call to another mutual basketball friend Andy and Dupuy share, helped move a second Crane onto a Division I women's basketball bench.
 
Additionally, it made for an even prouder set of parents in Baraboo, Wisconsin.
 
"(Coaching) is a really solid thing to do in life – not only to teach the game but also to impact lives," Dave says. "They have good relationships with their players, and they're promoting positive things.
 
"As far as following in my footsteps, there are a lot of ways to go out and serve, be out there in the public eye and do good in today's world. They're doing a pretty good job of that."