Always teaching. Willing to be innovative. Patient with his players (if not a little fiery with officials). While Scott does it at the college level, his father did it during a long and successful career of high school coaching.

Larry Frost, the man who, along with wife Carol, shaped the legendary career of Scott Frost the athlete and provided a blueprint for Scott Frost the coach, died Wednesday after a battle with cancer. He was 73.

“I see in Scott a lot of the way his dad coached. Larry has very, very seldom yelled at players,” Carol Frost told the Orlando Sentinel in 2015, shortly after Scott was hired as head coach at Central Florida. “I've seen him yell (at) an official once in a while, but he doesn't yell at his team, he doesn't yell at his kids. If they make a mistake, he'll pull them off the field and try to help them. He tries to fix things in practice.

“And as I watch Scott coach now, at Northern Iowa and Oregon, I see the same kind of thing. … He gets his point across without swearing, without yelling, without degrading, and I think he got a lot of that from his dad.”

Born March 14, 1947, and married to Carol for more than 50 years, Larry Frost raised two successful sons and coached at eight Nebraska high schools, in addition to stops in Texas, Missouri and Iowa, and almost always had Carol as one of his assistants. He was last on the sideline in 2013, leading Parkview Christian to the Class D-2 playoffs.

After Scott was hired at Nebraska, Larry became a regular at practices, usually watching with Carol from a vantage point in the balcony above the Hawks Championship Center field.

In 2019, Larry and Scott were inducted into the Nebraska High School Sports Hall of Fame together.

“I make no secret about it, I was approached to be inducted into the Hall of Fame in Nebraska quite a while ago,” Scott said in his induction speech. “I declined in the hope that one day my dad would be inducted, too, and I could be inducted the same time as my dad. So this is really special for me.”

Larry Frost grew up an outstanding athlete in his own right. He set what was at the time a national eight-man record with 121 career touchdowns and also set multiple school records in basketball and track at Malcolm High School, and in the mid-1960s was recruited to play football for the Huskers by a young graduate assistant coach named Tom Osborne.

In Lincoln, he lettered from 1967-69. As a senior in 1969, he caught 26 passes for 413 yards and two touchdowns, and rushed for 144 yards as Nebraska went 9-2.

While Larry had successful coaching stints all over Nebraska and the Midwest, his best teams came with his youngest son at quarterback.

Wood River made the Class C-1 semifinals in 1990 and 1992, Scott’s sophomore and senior seasons, as Scott was on his way to setting Nebraska high school records that stand today.

Larry’s eldest son, Steve, was a senior in high school when Scott was a sophomore, and went on to play football at Colorado State and Stanford.

Larry Frost is survived by his wife, Carol (Moseke), and both sons.

And throughout his adult life, he never lost the love of watching his sons in whatever area of life they chose.

“We thought that when he got done playing, a lot of the pressure was over and the worries of the parent would kind of fade away," Larry told the Journal Star in 2011, when Scott was a rising coaching star at Oregon. “But as we watch his football games, especially down the stretch here, trying to go undefeated, I think I was nervous and I think Carol was about as nervous watching him as when he played.

“I guess you never really lose the desire to watch your kids succeed.”

Photos from when Larry and Scott Frost were inducted into the Hall of Fame together