Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of stories on Darian DeVries’ background.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – Aplington, Iowa, isn’t a place you will likely pass through by accident. To get to the city of 1,116 in north central Iowa, you have to try pretty hard.

The nearest main highway is U.S. Route 20, 10 miles away from Aplington. There are two exits that could lead you there, but neither of them mention Aplington as the main city on the exit signs. Aplington gets relegated to a smaller sign that advertises its existence, kind of the highway department version of making all-conference honorable mention.

Aplington is a typical small Iowa farm town. It sits on the banks of Beaver Creek, an old granger railroad line survives intact, and it has a nicely kept downtown like most upper Midwestern bergs. There is no stoplight, but there is a Casey’s gas station – this is Iowa after all.

As far as where Indiana basketball coach Darian DeVries grew up, you’re not even there yet. Just outside Aplington is the DeVries family farm.

“We had cattle, we had pigs – they’re not as much fun – we had a few horses here and there, sometimes some chickens, but for the most part it was cattle and pigs. It was a smaller farm, I think it was about 80 acres. Corn, beans, hay, all the fun stuff,” Darian DeVries said in an interview with Hoosiers On SI.

The DeVries family farm is the genesis of what Indiana is getting in its new basketball coach. Because if Darian DeVries has one characteristic that guides him, it’s his work ethic honed from growing up on a farm.

That work ethic has taken DeVries very far indeed.

Darian is the oldest of Vern and Marge DeVries’ five children. The work ethic instilled in all of the DeVries children served them well, especially when it came to sports.

“My work ethic has come from my childhood, no question, with my parents and my upbringing there,” DeVries said.

“I grew up on the farm, so you’re kind of instilled with a work ethic with everything you have to do to make the farm go with livestock and stuff like that,” DeVries said.

Darian wasn’t the only DeVries child to achieve at a high level. Darian’s best known sibling is Jared DeVries, an All-American defensive end for Iowa who played 12 years for the Detroit Lions. Jared DeVries is a high school coach in Iowa – and returned to farming, too.

Another brother, Dusty, also played football for the Hawkeyes. Youngest brother Jay played at Wartburg College. Sister Jodi played volleyball at Northern Iowa.

“My siblings are all kind of wired the same way. Hard work, competitive, that’s something that on an everyday basis, shines through in my day to day,” DeVries said.

DeVries attended high school in the early 1990s. Aplington High won two Iowa state titles during DeVries’ sophomore and junior seasons, but enrollment at Aplington was so small, he was part of a consolidation for his senior year.

He graduated from the consolidated Aplington-Parkersburg High School in 1993 and led A-P deep into the Iowa playoffs before they were beaten by MFL MarMac High School, featuring future NBA player Raef LaFrentz.

DeVries was induced into the Iowa High School Athletic Association Hall of Fame in 2015 as a basketball player. But he was also a quarterback – the Des Moines Register reported in 2018 that DeVries talked his new football coach at A-P into converting from a run-based offense to a pass-based offense to take advantage of his quarterback skills – and played other sports, too.

Playing multiple sports in a small town cures boredom, but it still takes an impressive work ethic to excel at the level DeVries did.

“When you grow up in a small town, and if you’re in athletics, you’re playing every sport. So you go from football to basketball to baseball to track. That’s just what you do. If you didn’t, there’s not enough people to play. So that’s kind of your thing,” DeVries recalled.

This was the Darian DeVries that Greg McDermott got to know. Now Creighton’s head basketball coach, McDermott was just getting started on his coaching career as an assistant at North Dakota in the early 1990s when he recruited DeVries. Little did McDermott know he’d later have DeVries on his coaching staff with the Bluejays.

“He was hard-nosed and intense, just like he is as a coach. He has always had a great understanding of the game and was essentially a coach on the floor,” McDermott said in an email exchange with Hoosiers On SI.

McDermott didn’t get his guy that time. DeVries chose to play at Northern Iowa, about a half-hour away from the family farm.

DeVries played for one-time Ohio State coach Eldon Miller at UNI and was the Panthers’ point guard from 1994-98. UNI had not yet reached its status as an annual Missouri Valley Conference contender in the 1990s, but the Panthers did have their best-ever season in the MVC to that point with DeVries on the team when they went 11-7 in 1997.

DeVries’ ambitions at the time were to become an elementary teacher and high school basketball coach, but Miller was able to convince then-Creighton coach Dana Altman to take DeVries on as a graduate assistant in 1998.

That decision altered DeVries’ life path, one that eventually took him to Bloomington.