In this 1985 photo, Dick Ernst stands alongside sons Andy, Gordie and Bob, who that year were on the first line of the Cranston High School East hockey team.

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The Providence Journal / Kathy Borchers

CRANSTON –– For Richard “Dick” Ernst, even breakfast with his young sons was a coaching moment.

Cereal boxes and bowls turned into hockey players. Oranges and lemons were tennis balls.

And his three sons –– Robert, Gordon and Andrew –– consumed it all.

“Our house wasn’t really a house,” recalled Gordie, 41. “It was more like a locker room stop between the tennis and the hockey.”

Such is life in the orbit of Dick Ernst, 69, a high-energy tennis and hockey coach who recently completed his 100th season behind the bench in a career that included 36 years — more than 50 sports seasons — at Cranston High School East.

“It’s just something that’s innate, it’s something that’s in your blood –– competition,” he said. “It never left me.”

Ernst, for all his competitive zeal, is not the prototypical high school coach.

He is not a yeller. He does not berate. He gets by on sheer enthusiasm.

And the coach traces his fervor to a Cranston childhood saturated in sports.

Ernst learned tennis watching his father swat forehands and backhands at the tennis courts at nearby Roger Williams Park.

And he remembers wandering down to Cranston’s Aqueduct Field –– flooded and frozen in the winter –– to log ice time and admire the older kids playing hockey.

“That’s all I wanted to be, and it came true,” he said.

Ernst made his mark at what was then Cranston High School, winning the top singles spot on the tennis team and serving as captain of the hockey team his senior year, in 1956.

He went on to play both sports during a postgraduate year at Bridgton Academy, in Maine.

And at Providence College, where Ernst continued to wield the racket and hockey stick, he won the Mal Brown Award for sportsmanship, courage and honor –– a faded bit of gold he still displays with pride.

Ernst was standing on the tennis courts at Providence College a couple of months before his graduation, in 1961, when the head of the education department approached and told him he should make his way up to North Providence if he wanted a job.

There was an opening at the high school for a hockey coach. But the School Department needed more from him. The superintendent’s first question: Can you teach French?

“It was one of the best, nerviest decisions I made,” Ernst recalled. “I said, ‘Oh yeah.’”

He had taken some French at Bridgton and in college, but was not exactly fluent. Not even close.

Ernst spent a nervous couple of months boning up on the language and managed to teach four French I classes –– and even a French II –– at the high school that first year.

From 1962 to 1966, he coached the hockey team –– once playing two goaltenders in a game, simultaneously, against a far superior opponent.

But Ernst had his eye on his alma mater, by then renamed Cranston High School East.

And in 1966, he took a job as assistant coach for the school’s hockey team. He would hold that post for seven years and serve as head coach for a further 29 years, until 2002; during that time he coached the boys’ tennis team for 15 years. Since leaving Cranston East he has continued to perform coaching stints at other schools.

Ernst, who taught everything from math to history during his extensive career in education, has also coached at North Smithfield High School; Barrington High School; La Salle Academy and Moses Brown School, both in Providence, and Rhode Island College at various points.

His sons were among his best athletes –– serving as his top line on the Cranston East hockey team in 1985 and winning all-state honors a combined 15 times in the family’s two sports of choice.

Gordon went 97-0 in his high school singles tennis career, beating his brother Robert for the state title in 1984 and 1985.

But Ernst’s sons were not the only family members he coached. When his wife, Rollice, enrolled at Rhode Island College in the 1990s to earn a belated degree, Ernst worked on the finer points of her serve and groundstrokes.

“It was a lot of fun,” he said, “and it was the only time she had to listen to me.”

Ernst, who recently coached a girls’ hockey team for the first time, said he never loses his enthusiasm, never gets bored.

Every season, he said, “I feel like it’s my first team … It’s continually new kids, new characters, new parents.”

Rollice, 65, is not surprised by her husband’s continued enthusiasm.

“I can’t think of anybody who is luckier than he is,” she said. “He knew, right from the beginning, what he wanted to do with his life.”

dscharfe@projo.com