Sometimes the best opportunities in life are just one step further. Too bad Lance Roark didn’t take that last step.

It has been 18 years since Roark joined the men’s basketball program at Cornerstone University. He’s been a Golden Eagle for 17 of them, including this season.

But it’s that one year gap that still haunts him — at least that’s the running joke on the team.

The team won its only NAIA National Championship in 1999, but Roark wasn’t on the team — officially. He took the boys basketball head coaching position at Sparta High School. Not a bad move — just bad timing, considering he missed the only NAIA championship in team history.

“We always tell him to take a year off so we can win another national championship,” head coach Kim “Coach E” Elders said.

“Coach E always brings it up,” Roark said. “Coach E always rags me about it. The guys always tell me if they want to win another championship, then I’ve got to quit for another year. That’s the big joke.”

The truth is, if Roark had really taken the 1999 season off, the outcome may have been different. While he wasn’t receiving a paycheck from Cornerstone that season, he was still very much a part of the team.

“I was involved with the team that whole year anyway,” Roark said. “I was still supportive of the team. I was still around all the guys. I would go to games and root them on. So I still felt like I was involved.”

“I’m still a part of Cornerstone basketball,” he added. “That will never change.”

The joke originally caught Roark off guard.

“I didn’t even really think about it [at first],” he said about not officially being a coach. “Coach E’s the one who brought it up to me. [Soon after we won the championship], he said, ‘Yeah, it’s too bad you couldn’t be here the year we won it.’”

But Roark was there on the sidelines — and they did win it.

“I didn’t feel like that until he said it,” Roark said. “It didn’t even occur to me to think, ‘Oh, you weren’t there.’”

It didn’t occur to the players either.

“He recruited every single person on the team,” said Mark Zichterman, who was the starting center on the team. “To say he didn’t have an influence is ludicrous. He was still a coach to all of us that year even though he wasn’t on the bench. Always a good mentor.”

In fact, Brad Tilma, the starting point guard on the team that season, believes Roark deserves more credit than the NAIA has given him.

“Lance taught us for three years, and on that last year he should have got a ring because of what he did three years previous,” Tilma said. “He taught me the point guard game. I still believe he should get a ring, but whatever.”

Roark doesn’t care. He’s just glad the team won.

“It’s all good,” he said about the team hassling him with jokes. “I’ve busted their chops too about stuff. It goes both ways.

“I was happy to be around those guys, because you watch those kids grow up. You get to see the culmination of those four years.”

But what if he could do it over?

“Knowing what I know now, I would have to coach Sparta again,” Roark said. “I have to learn lessons the hard way. Just riding that gravy train to the Promised Land, I wouldn’t have learned the lessons I needed to learn to be a coach. If I wouldn’t have stepped back and I wouldn’t have taken my own job, I wouldn’t be as good a coach as I am now for sure.

“It gave me a greater appreciation for what a head coach does, so I feel like I can help Coach E more now because I know what he goes through on a daily basis. So it was a positive for me. I learned a ton during that year.”

And now CU players are learning a ton from Roark — officially — once again. Thanks to Roark the 2008-2009 Golden Eagles are poised to make yet another run at the national tournament.

“I’m glad Lance came back,” Tilma said. “He has a huge impact on our players.”