Basketball Schools And Winning Football GamesI think one of the really strange phenomenons in sports is the concept of high schools and colleges that are good at one of the two major sports and not the other.
The concept is that a school can’t be good at both football and boys/mens basketball for an extended period of time. Sure, maybe there is a year or two where a certain school is good at both, but not for long.
One example of this was always NorthWood, who was a football school. The Panthers had a long run of great teams and, after a short stretch of un-NorthWood-like seasons, are back to that.
The thinking that the collective NorthWood community cared more about football than basketball is natural and normal, but to say that they care so little about basketball would be inaccurate and do those people a great injustice.
Aaron Wolfe certainly thought NorthWood loved basketball enough and the administration supported basketball enough that there was an expectation of excellence there—and now he’s their head coach.
Triton is another example.
Yes, I understand that enrollments at smaller schools make filling football rosters a challenge. But schools smaller than Triton have no trouble being really good and both football and basketball.
You may not remember it, but when I was in high school in the 80’s Triton had the longest football losing streak in the state. Meanwhile the walls outside the Trojan Trench are lined with pictures of guys who were outstanding basketball players on outstanding basketball teams.
While not as much in recent years, Triton is best known as a basketball school.
Think about Notre Dame—football school. Duke and North Carolina—basketball schools.
And then there is Warsaw.
The History of Tiger Basketball is a story worthy of a good, thick book that I hope someone writes someday. It is filled with excellence at the individual and corporate levels that few programs in the state can rival.
Warsaw has been a basketball school. Sure, there has always been football teams that took the field on autumn Friday nights. And those teams were good. Their coaches were good. Some of the players on them were good.
But, from Leesburg to Silver Lake and from the outskirts of Pierceton to Atwood, basketball mattered more.
A lot more.
That all changed in the spring and summer of 1996—that’s when Phil Jensen came to town.
The Tigers only won two games in the fall of ’96, but the ground was being prepared for a leveling of interest and importance of the football and basketball programs in the community.
Two years later Jensen led Warsaw to the school’s first playoff win. By 1999 the Tigers won eight games and in 2001 they played a perfect regular season.
Football mattered here—and it mattered a lot.
And the wall of Warsaw being a basketball town fell, and remarkably, basketball survived! As a matter of fact, in the almost two decades since 2001 there has been a palpable longing to make Warsaw football a consistent winner. People here remembered what those years of winning were like, and they have wanted to feel that way again.
When Hall of Fame football coach Bart Curtis applied for the Tiger job and was hired, it raised a lot of eyebrows. Why would a man with a winning resume like Bart Curtis’s want to coach at Warsaw? What could he possibly think he could accomplish in what many still considered a basketball town?
The locals have been excited about not only the product they were seeing on the field, but also in their neighborhoods and at community events. The players were there—setting up tables and chairs, tearing down, helping in any way possible. It was the extension of Jensen’s “son-student-athlete” philosophy and they loved it.
But none of us really knew what was happening—what was really going on here—until the middle of the third quarter last Friday. With the Kingsmen threatening to wrestle away another opportunity for the Tigers to make school history, Juan Jaramillo took a handoff and raced 77 yards to the south end zone. As the yard lines passed by like railroad ties to a passing train, defenders dropped off one-by-one in his wake. So did the frustrations of 35 years of trying to prove that Warsaw could be a basketball town AND a football town too.
Maybe when Jaramillo crossed that goal line and arrived in the end zone, it meant Warsaw finally had arrived at the balance it had been searching for.
