From Deseret News archives:
Weber brothers living their mother's coaching dreams
The Weber family has crisscrossed the Midwest for the last three weeks, watching one brother, David, win a state high school championship, while another, Bruce, takes his team to the NCAA Final Four. It's been a balm for their grief, a tribute to the mother whose greatest joy was watching her sons coach.
"We knew how important our lives and our careers were to my mom and my dad. We knew we had to go on with it, and there's no doubt they would be so excited, so proud," Bruce Weber said Friday, a day he was honored as The Associated Press coach of the year.
"They sacrificed so much for us to be where we are now. They wanted us to have a better life. They wanted us to be teachers and coaches," he said. "So we're living their dream."
Basketball is the thread that binds the Weber family together. Their father, Louis, taught all three of his boys to play when they were growing up in Milwaukee, and a favorite outing was going downtown to MECCA to watch Al McGuire and the Marquette Warriors.
As they got older, the Weber boys frequented McGuire's clinics, soaking up all the knowledge they could.
"We learned the game together," said Ron Weber, the oldest of the three. "All three of us fell in love with basketball."
So it came as no surprise that all three would choose coaching as their profession. Ron is the longtime coach at Waupaca High School in northern Wisconsin, Bruce is at Illinois, and David coaches at Glenbrook North in suburban Chicago.
Their sister, Jan Moeller, is a teacher.
Though her sons were spread throughout the Midwest, Dawn Weber kept a close eye on their careers — even getting a satellite system so she could see all the Illini games. And when Bruce and David both had games in Chicago on March 11, the 81-year-old widow made the trip south so she could watch them in person.
But when she went to the United Center to pick up her tickets for the Big Ten tournament, Dawn Weber complained of chest pains. She was taken to a nearby hospital, where doctors discovered a tear in her aorta below the heart. Several hours into surgery, she died.
"We miss Mom tremendously," Ron Weber said. "I should be getting ready to take her down to St. Louis. But a real good thing has been we've been able to get involved in the success of Illinois and Glenbrook North. I guess that's kind of eased the pain a little bit."
Despite the grief, David and Bruce both stayed on the bench. Dawn Weber insisted upon it, telling Ron and Jan before she went into surgery that she wanted her sons to keep coaching and not worry about her.
