This isn't just about good manners, or simply honoring thy mother, though those would be respected reasons for Scott Frost to say it's Mom who's the best athlete in the family.
When the subject is Carol Frost, we are talking about the first woman from Nebraska to compete in the Summer Olympics. We are talking about someone who basically taught herself to throw a shot put and discus at a level that would have a medal placed around her neck at the Junior Olympics by a man known then as Cassius Clay. It was later years when he would take on the name which carries so much weight today – Muhammad Ali.
Carol still remembers finishing second in the shot put at those Junior Olympics in Los Angeles. And geez, she would have won the discus but her best throw traveled out of bounds. "From then on, I decided I might be kind of good at this," she says, and she was right.
She'd go on to throw the discus in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City at a time when the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's training facilities weren't available to women, since women's sports did not yet carry varsity status. When that did change, she'd come back and later coach the Husker women's cross country and track and field teams in 1976, leading them to their first indoor and outdoor conference titles and three top-10 national finishes. It is all why she is going into the Nebraska Athletics Hall of Fame this weekend.
All this came after she taught herself how to throw the shot put and discus by reading books, and gaining some assistance from an English teacher who at first knew as much as she did about track and field – nothing. She'd train by running up the steps of the town hall, or running to the State Fairgrounds, or running around a pig barn. She had a couple dumbbells she used.
All this wasn't much. It was enough for Carol to use to become an Olympian. So this is why Scott Frost calls her the best athlete in the family. Also the best coach too.
"He said I was the best athlete yesterday again. I can't believe that," she says, before cheerfully adding, "I agree."
Oh, yeah, she'd coach other sports beyond track and field too, including football with her husband, Larry.
So to just call her Scott Frost's mom sort of does an injustice to all she did in sports long before Scott was running wild against Washington in 1997. Although, you bet, she carries the stories of her son's rise as close as anything. "The monkey was off his back," as she would say of that day in Seattle 22 years ago.
Seeing her son as the head coach of Nebraska now is hard to put into words.
"Who would have ever thought when he was growing up in Texas, or he was a high school athlete, that he was going to be the coach at the University of Nebraska?" Carol said. "Larry played for Devaney of all people ... and then to think that Scott has fallen into the same position, it's just unbelievable for our family."
The Frosts have been around athletics so long that nothing comes that unexpected as far as the games go. OK, she'll grant you maybe the 4-8 record the first year at Nebraska was a little bit that way.
She always knew Scott could do something significant with athletics as much as he was surrounded by it, and off the talent he possessed. There was a little luck too. Although maybe she wouldn't call it luck.
"I think it's a God thing that he was sitting in a recruiting office of a high school coach in Florida, and Chip Kelly is recruiting the same kid," Carol says. "They talk, and then Chip Kelly offers him a job at the University of Oregon. To me, being a Christian, I think that's a God thing. That doesn't just happen."
That was the jumpstart, and as the proud mother says, Scott certainly made the best of it.
It's not uncommon to see Larry and Carol at the Hawks Championship Center these days watching Scott's Husker teams practice. She's as dialed in as anyone, recognizing quickly if someone's not on the field who should be. Those are the fun days, really. The stress-free ones. A practice could go 2 1/2 hours and she won't budge. She loves watching it. She used to coach wide receivers when Scott was playing at Wood River, after all.
She doesn't agree with Scott that she's the best coach in the family, but she is "a technician" about the game that would surely put most in this state to shame.
What about gamedays? Yeah, those will make you a little tense, even if you have been around athletics your whole life.
"Oh gosh, I don't know how many laps around our pool table in the basement I make when the games get close," Carol says. "Because if we're not watching in the stadiums, I'm up walking. It's nerve wracking, there's no doubt about it."
It was a different time for many reasons when she was coming up as an athlete. Her parents were 40 when she was born. They would not miss her volleyball and softball games – the only two sports girls were allowed to play at the time in Cedar Rapids, Nebraska. But they never saw her run a track meet. They didn't know what it was all about because there was no track and field for women there then.
To see a meet, they have had to drive to Cozad or Kansas City, or even Montana. "Farmers just didn't have the money to do that." They didn't get to see her throw in the Olympics either.
Overcoming it all, it's just a slice of the reason Scott Frost is so proud to talk about the accomplishments of his mom.
"When she was doing the things she did, there weren't opportunities for women in sports. And there were even some people that frowned upon it," Scott said. "So she really had to do anything kind of on her own ... For what she accomplished in those circumstances, it's amazing."