Joshua Heape remembers being in the gym the night his father's basketball team won state.

It was 2008. He was a kid. His dad — who has been a sixth-grade science teacher and basketball coach at Du Quoin for nearly 30 years — was on the sideline. Josh was in the stands.

Next fall, he and his dad will coach together at the middle school. And some of the eighth graders they'll be coaching are the children of the players Josh watched that night.

"It's kind of crazy," he said, "when he talks about coaching parents and kids."

This is what full circle looks like in a small town where everyone's story eventually folds back into everyone else's.

Joshua Heape — Du Quoin class of 2019, all-south in basketball and all-conference in football as a quarterback for Coach Hill — joins the district this fall as a middle school PE teacher, freshman football coach, and assistant basketball coach. By the time school starts, three members of the Heape family will be teaching in the district simultaneously. His father has been there for 29 years; his mother joined as the high school health/driver's ed teacher four years ago.

The teaching life wasn't always the plan. After high school, Josh attended John A. Logan College and earned his Licensed Practical Nurse credential. He had real athletic ability — opportunities to play basketball at the college level — but chose to stay close to home. Nursing interested him, then didn't. His passport was stamped with LPN, a pivot, a bachelor's in Sports Administration at SIU Carbondale, and then a master's in the same field.

Along the way, he became a teaching assistant, instructing kinesiology and intro fitness courses. He was eventually hired as SIU's Competitive Sports Coordinator, running intramurals and sport clubs — a role he genuinely enjoyed.

Then Du Quoin opened a PE position.

He called it a "super 50/50 decision." But when he weighed both sides of it, the question that settled it was simple: where would his work mean the most? "Being able to impact students' lives positively for the rest of their lives," he said — teaching healthy habits, building character through physical activity — "I think that's something that would bring me a lot of fulfillment."

He has been building toward that kind of work for years. He still works out five days a week. He has been deeply involved with the Du Quoin Youth Club, helping run youth sports and watching kids develop from season to season. He brings a background that connects nursing, kinesiology, sports administration, and years of competitive coaching into a single conviction: "You teach kids how to be healthy. And that's something that can last with them for literally their entire life."

The people who shaped him understand this. His parents worked multiple jobs as educators — modeling discipline through example, not lecture. Former basketball coach Justin Barrington became a mentor whose influence stretched far past the court, helping Josh break into officiating and coaching, connecting him to an SIU internship with the men's basketball program. Coach David Gaytan — Josh's freshman football coach, a Kindergarten teacher here, and later a fellow coach at the middle school — became someone Josh talked through nearly every significant life decision with over four years of shared work.

He has an older brother, Braden, who he’s looked up to his whole life. There has been no shortage of achievement and standard bearing in the family. Then there's his younger sister. She graduated two years after him — valedictorian, senior athlete of the year, and now an engineering student at the University of Illinois. Josh had stayed home while she left for one of the most demanding programs in the state. He watched. He admired.

"I wish I were half as smart as she was," he said.

His grandparents have a saying he carries: "If you do something you like, you'll never work a day in your life." He has arranged his entire career around the belief that they were right.

This fall, he becomes Mr. Heape — gym teacher, coach, son of a coach — walking the same hallways where he once watched someone else run practice and figured, quietly, that this was the life he wanted.

The village raised him. He came back to return the favor.