Hoop Dreams

March Madness will soon be here and I hope to see the Kansas Jayhawks go far in the post-season NCAA tournament — maybe even win the national championship as they did exactly 20 years ago next month.

I attended the KU game against Colorado last Saturday and it was retro all the way.

Retro in the speed of the game — slow, thanks to the Colorado stall-offense; the Buffaloes would wait until the final seconds ticked off on the shot clock before shooting on practically every possession.

What does all this have to do with Ark City? Read down a little farther and you'll see.

KU had little trouble with Colorado, leading all the way except for the first bucket.

It wasn't much of a game but halftime ceremonies made it worth the price of admission and the four-hour drive up to Lawrence. That was retro too: a reunion of players and coaches from "110 years of KU basketball."

Arkansas City's own Loye Sparks, a basketball star at Ark City Juco (now Cowley College) in the 1959-60 and '60-61 seasons was among the hundreds of basketball players from former KU teams who were honored. He went on to play at KU after his two seasons at ACJC. Loye also played ball in high school, graduating in 1959.

Sparks was one of several basketball greats in Ark City during that era.

In 1961, he tied the single-game scoring record for the Tigers, scoring 49 points. The record orginally was set by Del Heidebrecht, a Tigers center who scored 49 points in a game against Hutchinson on Jan. 21, 1958.

Another star player for the Tigers was Bill Clarahan, who was inducted, posthumously, into the Tiger Hall of Fame last Saturday.

In town for the reunion weekend was Dan Kahler, who coached the Tigers during the Fabulous Fifties. Kahler coached nationally ranked teams during that decade.

The court at W.S. Scott Auditorium — previously the Auditorium-Gymnasium — is named after Kahler. Back in the '50s and '60s the auditorium drew capacity crowds that roared in deafening support of the Tigers. The band repeatedly played "Hold 'Em Tigers."

We need to try to regain that kind of atmosphere in Ark City — the whole town turning out to support its teams.

Not since the early decades of the 1900s has Ark City High won a boys state basketball championship. One of the members of that 1918 team was Merle Hinton, who taught many youngsters in the 1950s — myself included — basketball in his "Junior Police" program held in what is now the Fire Department headquarters.

This year's ACHS basketball team is pretty good and maybe we can expect more good teams in years to come.

One idea I have pitched to both the Cowley president and the local superintendent of schools is to bring back Ark City High School basketball to the downtown auditorium for several games a year. The auditorium could be the venue for a holiday tournament, for example.

Cowley President Patrick McAtee said he'd be interested in considering such an idea. But local school officials apparently have other more pressing issues now; it seems that high school basketball downtown is on the back burner.

Of course the Bulldogs played in the auditorium for many years before the high school moved to the north edge of town in the early 1980s.