[Editor’s Note: Today we have a very special piece from our own Jamie Rathjen, who has a great little bit of uni news from his dad, who also happened to have a connection to a pair of notable athletes through his High School basketball team. Enjoy! — PH]
Uni Watch Show and Tell: 1965-66 Iowa Valley HS Boys’ Basketball
by Jamie Rathjen
My dad recently came across some pictures on Ancestry.com from one of his high school basketball teams, the 1965-66 edition of Iowa Valley HS’s boys’ team in Marengo, Iowa. As he puts it:
The first is a team photo [pictured above]. We were 20-2 that year. We lost in what I believe was the district finals to Iowa City Regina. Three of us were sophomores promoted from the junior varsity – Nos. 34, 20, and 42. So, we didn’t play that much, but did start one game when the coach was punishing the starters for some reason I have forgotten. My high score that year was 17 points. My best game was 31 points, I don’t remember whether it was my junior or senior year.
Here’s the full page on their season from the yearbook.
It took me a couple glances to notice the big I on the sides of the shorts, a nice touch on the otherwise nondescript uniforms pictured. The school’s colors are currently black and orange, so I assume that was also the case back then.
But the way more interesting part than the uniforms is who was on this team with my dad. You can see in these individual pictures (besides him) two names in particular.
I won’t make you guess which ones they are. The first was would-be Olympian Rick Wanamaker, who ended up getting a place in NCAA men’s basketball tournament lore instead. As my dad says:
Right above me dunking the basketball in the individual photos is Rick Wanamaker. He was both a track & basketball star. He is known principally for winning the decathlon in the 1971 Pan American Games and for blocking a shot against Lew Alcindor (now Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) in the 1969 NCAA national basketball semi-finals. He went to Drake University, and they made it to the semi-finals of the NCAA basketball tournament where he famously blocked the shot. Rick was drafted by the Cleveland Cavaliers but decided not to pursue pro basketball. He was the 1970 NCAA national champion [in the decathlon], an All-American in [the] decathlon, and the 1971 AAU National Champion in [the] decathlon. He was one of the favorites, if not the favorite, for the 1972 Munich Olympics, but was injured prior to the Olympic trials, and did not qualify.
Wanamaker stuffing then-Lew Alcindor on national television was named one of the top 100 plays in the history of the NCAA men’s tournament by Bleacher Report in 2012. You can watch the entire game on YouTube (first and second halves).
The second was Del Miller, who had a long career as a football coach and is a member of the coaching tree of Hayden Fry at Iowa. If, like me, you’ve watched many Iowa football games, you’ve seen the picture and heard about the team’s 1983 coaching staff many times over, famous for the absurd amount of talent it ended up producing, including Miller and current Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz. As my dad says:
He played football at Central College in Iowa and was eventually head coach at Southwest Missouri State University—now known as Missouri State University—from 1995 to 1998, compiling a record of 21–23. But his story runs through the University of Iowa. Del was a longtime assistant at Kansas State University under head coach Bill Snyder. He was the first assistant Bill Snyder hired in 1989 and served three separate stints with the program — he worked for Snyder at Kansas State a total of 20 years. He was co-offensive coordinator/quarterbacks coach at Kansas State from 2009 to 2016. Now the Iowa connection, Del and Bill Snyder had previously coached together as assistants at the University of Iowa under Hayden Fry.
Miller also ended up marrying my dad’s cousin. It’s a fascinating story. Who knew that one mid-’60s small-town high school basketball team would produce two Wikipedia article-worthy players?
As my first name is Ingmar I will always applaud uniforms with a huge I placed somewhere (in this case the shorts). Great story, go Tigers!
Enjoyed the long-form ‘Dads in Uniform’ entry…great reading!
Thanks for sharing, Jamie!
Looking at the scores, I was impressed with the over 100 pt games, before the 3 point line. I attended HLV, not then but in early 90s and I am just now finding out this history. WOW.
Another interesting detail in the photo: Every player is wearing an even number! I’m guessing that their away jerseys had odd numbers, likely each player’s home number +1 or -1, so each player had separate home and away numbers.
I think this was common around that time, and I imagine it was meant to help with scorekeeping (reporting fouls to the table and such). Growing up in 1990s Chicagoland, there were still some high schools with this format.
Does anyone know more about this odd/even convention?
That’s definitely the case here. Although this numbering convention is no longer de rigueur, it was quite popular right up until the 1980s. The home team would wear even numbers, and the road team wore odd (supposedly to make it easier for officials to call fouls). I think (doing this from a fairly faulty memory), the Houston Cougars Phi Slama Jamma team actually used the home-even/road-odd configuration. For example Akeem wore 34 at home (link) and 35 on the road (link)
My dad doesn’t remember if they actually did that, but it makes sense.
When I was in HS in Iowa, the state had home teams in even, road teams in odd to make the foul calls easier.
Another twist on this – the player numbers are all two digits. That may have also been a rule at that time, to eliminate confusion with the number of free throws, player fouls, etc. In the 1970s, there was a prohibition against numbers lower than “3” in Oregon because “1” or “2” could be confused with free throws being awarded.
I also went to a Chicagoland HS, in my case in the late 70’s. We also had the split numbers. My HS was brand new, as in still under construction my freshman year so we had no gym of our own. We played each team in our conference twice (supposed to be home and home) at their gym. The Varsity got to play as the ‘Home’ team the second time around. The freshman team went to a school the second time and only took the road uni’s as we didn’t expect them to do the same for us. The host school had only brought their road uni’s so we ended with a game of dark green vs dark brown. The kid doing the scoring for us was easily intimated so when a foul was called on ‘#33’ the other team’s scorer was able to bully our scorer into accepting that ‘that’s a foul on your #33’… We had multiple guys foul out when they really hadn’t…..
Forget the nostalgia about uniforms and coaching pedigree . . . look at some of those final scores during the season. This team consistently scored in the 80s, 90s and, in a few, above 100 points. It was stacked!!!
Hey, Jamie! I loved your story today! It was a great trip down memory lane for me. No, I’m not anywhere close to old enough to remember your dad’s team, but I did grow up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, were our local paper and TV stations reported on Iowa Valley games on a regular basis.
As a bit of an amateur historian of notable moments in collegiate sports history in Iowa, I’m familiar with both Rick Wanamaker and Del Miller. I might have heard that they went to Iowa Valley High, but I’d certainly forgotten and would have never put the connection together that they played on the same teams. That’s a fun feather in Marengo’s cap to have them as native sons!
And I’m a huge fan of those shorts the Tigers are wearing in those photos. I suspect they may have taken their inspiration from a similar style worn by the Iowa men’s team in the 1950s and ’60s, which included both gold (link) and black (link) versions of the “I.”
One last item of note. Those old uniforms with only numbers and no names on the chests were commonplace in Iowa high school boys’ basketball for decades, including well into the 1970s, when it seemed that high schools in most other states had switched to more modern uniforms with chest lettering. One school in Cedar Rapids – Washington High School – kept that style as something of a long-standing uni tradition (kind of akin to Penn State’s ultra-simple football uniforms) into the early ’90s at least. It stood out against all the more conventional uniforms their competitors wore. I can’t find a photo of it more recent than this shot of the school’s 1969 state championship team (link), but I can confirm anecdotally that their uniforms looked identical when I was in high school at a cross-town rival in the late ’80s.