Hoops champs of BV County

Green Bay, Wisc., home of the NFL Packers, may claim to be Title Town USA, but Newell-Fonda can call itself Iowa’s Title Town. The Mustangs won their fifth girls state basketball championship last Saturday in Des Moines with a 64-56 win over Algona Garrigan.

The Mustangs have played in 11 of the last 14 state championship games and have been in the finals seven of the last eight years. Their last state title was in 2021. Dick Jungers has done a masterful job in his 21 years as head coach there and if he keeps going could become the winningest girls basketball coach in Iowa history.

Jamie Knapp, the dean of Iowa sportswriters, has documented it all in the pages of the Storm Lake Times Pilot, as well as the feats of other area schools, over the past three decades. He’s been to every one of the Mustangs’ state championship games and his stories and photos decorate the refrigerators and scrapbooks of thousands of area high school athletes over the years.

While we celebrated the Mustangs win, the Cullen family’s roots are in Algona, so we appreciated Garrigan’s effort too. Our mom and dad were from Whittemore and Bancroft in Kossuth County, and most of us were born in Algona before we moved to Storm Lake in 1956. Dolores is a graduate of Garrigan High School.

THIS WEEK it’s the Storm Lake boys turn to dominate Casey’s Center (I still tend to call it Wells Fargo Arena) in Des Moines.

This was written before the results of all the games were known, but the Tornadoes, who are ranked third in the state in Class 3A, hope to bring the big trophy back to The City Beautiful for the first time in 46 years. They got off to a nail-biting start Monday afternoon, eking out a 68-60 overtime win over Solon.

Storm Lake has won the championship twice before, in 1968 and 1980. Only one member of each team still lives in Storm Lake, so we asked them for their memories.

Jim Jorgensen was a senior forward on the 1968 team coached by Barry Holtgrewe that rebounded from a 13-point third quarter deficit to shock top-ranked Des Moines Roosevelt 71-61 in the Class 2A finals. The retired banker is the only team member left in the old hometown today. The Tornadoes advanced to the championship by defeating Waterloo East and Harlan in the first two rounds. Jorgensen and teammate Virg Robinson, a retired commodities broker living in Des Moines, went to Monday’s game together. Robinson recalled that in 1968 the games were Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. “We had a deep bench,” Robinson, a guard, recalled, “but we were tired” after playing three games in three days.

Jorgensen, who was also quarterback of the Tornadoes football team, said the 1968 championship was special because “it was the first time Storm Lake had been involved in something that big. And we played in the big class.”

Don Canfield, who was assistant boys basketball coach, was also Jorgensen’s head football coach.

The lone homeboy from 1980’s only other championship team is Kevin Cone, who is still calling auctions around the Midwest from his base in Storm Lake, although teammate John Mernin lives nearby in Newell. Cone, who was a deadly accurate shooter, later helped coach the Tornadoes for a few years in the early 2000s.

Larry Parman was head coach in 1980, assisted by John Brostad. The veteran Tornadoes, with 11 seniors on the roster, beat Knoxville 59-47 to win the championship en route to an undefeated 24-0 record. The year before they had finished fourth with a 19-2 record.

Cone still remembers that after winning the title, Parman revealed to the team, gathered in the locker room deep in the bowels of Veterans Auditorium, he was so confident they’d win that he had made tournament hotel reservations for Des Moines the previous October.

I AM the only player from St. Mary’s 1968 basketball team who still lives in Storm Lake. However, unlike Jorgensen and Cone, my team did not advance to the state tournament. Nevertheless, we Panthers were proud of the Tornadoes’ success in 1968, although admittedly  a wee bit jealous. The Panthers, coached by Brad Wilkening, finally got their day in the sun when they brought home the Class 1A trophy in 2011.

Storm Lake High School has played in the boys state tournament 12 times. St. Mary’s has been there three times. The only other Buena Vista County schools to win a state championship were Alta in 1972, coached by Al Koster, and Newell-Fonda in 1991, 1997, 1999 and 2000, coached by Paul Loos. The Cyclones appeared in four state tournaments and in 1975 beat Buena Vista County rival Albert City-Truesdale, coached by Jerry Moss, 66-59 in the Class 1A consolation game for third place. AC-T’s Hurricanes played in three state tournaments and their best finish was fourth in 1975.