There is an old saying that goes “when God closes one door, he opens another.” Gary Teel knows that saying, and he knows it’s true. Teel will lead the Argos High School girls basketball team into the Class 1A state championship game at Bankers Life Fieldhouse in Indianapolis Saturday morning six years after he coached his last game at Tippecanoe Valley. The people in Argos are REALLY glad he became available. Teel is an interesting sort of guy. He’s not a “yeller.” He deals with people quietly. His way is a way of speaking softly and firmly and forcing you to lean closer to him to hear what he has to say because you know it’s worth hearing. He looks like a mix between Santa Claus and your cool uncle who always took you for ice cream and let you put extra sprinkles on it. And when he hangs a whistle around his neck and hits the practice court, he has a calm confidence that makes everyone around him know that he knows what he is talking about, that he believes in it, and that it will work if you believe in it too. It’s quite refreshing. So when he left Tippecanoe Valley at the end of the 2010 basketball season you can understand that there were a lot of people who were caught off guard. I was certainly in that group. In his decade as coach there, he was pretty successful: • 142 wins and a .631 winning percentage in 10 years. • Seven winning seasons • Five sectional titles But his last three seasons ended with a combined record of 30-33, and Teel wasn’t coaching at Tippecanoe Valley anymore. It just didn’t seem right. Valley turned the reigns over to Chris Kindig, and that certainly has worked out very well. The Lady Vikings have won 90 games over the last six seasons, including 50 over the last two seasons and a berth in the 3A state title game. Kindig has done a great job. But for a lot of people in the Valley family, there’s still something that hasn’t felt right – which is why Saturday’s crowd at the 1A semistate at Crown Point wearing Argos old gold and black included quite a few people who had been wearing Valley green and gold at the 3A Columbia City Regional the weekend before. Two years after his exit from Tippecanoe Valley, the Argos girls head coaching job opened up. Argos is a school whose only real success in girls basketball came when it lost to Lafayette Central Catholic in the 2006 semistate at Plymouth under Shelly Newell. That was the last of a three-year run where Argos won a total of 57 games. Outside of that, most of the four decades of girls basketball at Argos has been mediocre at best. Until this season. The Dragons are 24-3 and playing Jac-Cen-Del for the 1A crown. If you have never been to Argos, you could find it simply by following the old gold glow emanating from the southern Marshall County town. They haven’t been this jacked up for a basketball game since Bill O’Dell’s tip-in at the buzzer beat Marion in the Fort Wayne Semistate – in 1979. And at the center of all of the attention is a white-haired, bearded basketball coach who has guided Argos to the center of the basketball universe for the first time in the 37-year history of the girls state tournament. Calmly, without fanfare, he pushes his girls forward to take all of the credit. Just what you would expect from Teel. As much as he may not want to be, Teel IS a major part of the story of the Lady Dragons’ first ever business trip to Indianapolis. After he and Valley parted ways in the spring of 2010, he could have packed it in and called it a career. He’s not a ‘spring chicken’ after all. No one would have blamed him. But most of us didn’t account for one simple fact: The pilot light on Gary Teel’s coaching career was still burning brightly. Argos High School fanned that flame. It’s got them both 32 minutes from the school’s first girls state basketball championship. Of course this story matters to me because that’s MY school. There are daughters of my high school friends on this roster. It matters a little more because it’s Teel who helped make it happen. Teel is one of the best of the truly good people I have run across in my 25 years of covering basketball at the radio stations. And because he didn’t quit, that little town in southern Marshall County is about to experience the moment of a lifetime. At 10:05 Saturday morning, the Argos girls basketball team will run out of the tunnel and onto the court at Bankers Life Fieldhouse to the roar of the crowd … a crowd that will include a bunch of fans from Tippecanoe Valley who got a welcome hand up onto the Dragon bandwagon. And that door that closed at Tippecanoe Valley … well the door that opened is the door to the locker room at the Fieldhouse in Indy. “Go Big D” … and God bless Gary Teel.
