DC: Title Town '64

   For Chuck Brehm, a history major and ROTC man while attending Washburn University in the early 50's, coaching was something that "just happened."
    But during his five-year tenure as head men's basketball coach at what was then Dodge City Junior College, he made a national championship happen.
    Brehm was inducted into the DCCC Hall of Fame Saturday for the outstanding athletic achievement.
    "It was  wonderful experience — a humbling honor," Brehm said of Saturday's induction. "It was a tremendous cap of everything we were able to accomplish at Dodge City and really gratifying."
    The "we" mentality of which he speaks went a long way during the 1963-1964 season, when the Conqs cut down the nets in Hutchinson, which is the annual site for the NJCAA National Championship Tournament. Any one of the team's top seven players could go off for 20 or more points on a given night, but it was the team's ability to mesh quickly and generate a healthy chemistry that carried them to the national title.
    Larry Soice, who was a spot-starter at guard and the team's sixth man, said Brehm was instrumental in bringing that chemistry to the team.
    "Coach Brehm did an outstanding job of getting us to play together," Soice said. "Because the composition of the team was so scattered. It was made up of guys from small schools in Kansas, but then you also had a group of guys from the East Coast. There were two entirely different cultures on that team."
    Soice, who now resides in Wichita, came to Dodge from Montezuma High School.
    "That was the strength of this team," Brehm said. "It wasn't all the individual scoring numbers. It was team-oriented. That's what made the team as good as they were."
    Conq center Carl Head and forwards Bob Pipkin and Galen "Sam" Frick routinely cashed in 20 points each. The team, whose up-temp style masked a lack of dominating size up front, also got big contributions from the backcourt tandem of Frank Selby and Reggie Greene.

A young team
    What made the Conqs' stunning run to the championship even more unexpected, though, was that the bulk of these contributors were freshmen. The popular wisdom of the day was that the Conqs might have a nice looking team once they matured as sophomores in the 1964-1965 season, but the freshmen put together a 21-game win streak in the middle of the season to get Dodge City and the surrounding community behind the Conqs.
    "There weren't a whole lot of high expectations at the beginning of the season," Soice said. "But by the end of the conference season, the arena was full every game."
    Even during the lengthy string of wins, the Conqs' highest ranking in the NJCAA polls was No. 5. The freshman-laden squad whose following in town was starting to grow was still not getting the national recognition it would later prove it deserved.
    But Brehm wasn't worried about that. The coach who kept an even keel concerned himself more with his team's fundamental soundness each time they took the court than with national implications.
    "We ran an awful lot of drills," Soice said. "We weren't the flashiest team in the world, but coach Brehm was really good at teaching the basics of basketball."
    The heady play and quick development of the Dodge City youngsters that resulted from Brehm's constant drilling produced win after win, and after an 87-72 victory at home over perennial power Hutchinson CC early in February of 1964, the Conqs could see a Jayhawk West Conference title on the horizon.

The run-up
    An easy 96-61 win over Pratt clinched the league title on Feb. 18, and Dodge was riding an 18-game win streak into the postseason. With their third win of the season over both Butler County and Garden City JC, the Conqs claimed the Region VI sub-regional championship and earned a berth in a three-game series with the Coffeyville JC Red Ravens, who had been ranked higher than the Conqs throughout the entire season.
    In the latest NJCAA poll during the run-up to the March 9 clash of the Kansas Juco titans, DCCC still weighed in at No. 5, while the Ravens were the second-ranked team in the nation. Again, popular wisdom said the Conqs had no shot in the series — the final two games were played in Coffeyville.
    "To win down there was going to be quite an achievement," Brehm said. "They were an excellent team."
    But the Conqs dispensed with the Ravens in game one at the Civic Center with a dramatic finish in game one. Coffeyville's Henry Carey traveled as he drove through the lane and scooped home a shot with just six seconds left to play, and Dodge City escaped with a 69-68 win.
    "That series with Coffeyville had some of the most exciting moments for the players," Soice said. "Nobody expected us to win it."
    After Coffeyville beat Dodge handily in game two, 73-60, the chatter back home was again that the Conqs had already overachieved, and a game three loss to the Ravens was a foregone conclusion. In a March 13, 1965 Daily Globe column, sports editor Lee Finch said that no representative of the Globe went to Coffeyville for game three because it was widely assumed that, after the game-two thrashing, the Conqs were done for in game three on the Ravens' home court.
    But Head and Pipkin scored 21 and 20 points respectively to lead Dodge to the upset win and earn a berth in the national championship tournament. The Conqs entered the tourney as the top-seeded team.
    They managed five-point wins over Southwest (Mo.) Baptist and Eastern Arizona before dismantling a Trenton (N.J.) JC 110-86. Head was averaging over 25 points per game during the tourney going into the national finals.

Finals
    Dodge City was up against the Casper (Wyo.) Thunderbirds in the finals. The game was tied at halftime, but Dodge built a double-digit lead behind the potent scoring of Greene, Head and Pipkin.
    After a Thunderbird comeback attempt fell short, Dodge proved everyone wrong and took the national title with a 73-68 win.
    "They became a very poised team," Brehm said. "The chemistry just seemed to grow and grow as the season went along."
    And with most of the team returning for the '64-'65 campaign, thoughts of back-to-back championships crept into Dodge City. But the Conqs lost in the first round of the NJCAA National Championship Tourney in March of 1965 to Burlington (Iowa) JC on a controversial goaltending call.
    "At the induction, we were talking about that call, and Frank Selby said 'It wasn't goaltending then, and it's never going to be.'"
    Burlington was later found to have played the game with an ineligible player on the roster and was forced to forfeit the outcome of the game. So technically, Dodge did not lose a game in the national tournament during either season.
    The Conqs ended Brehm's final season at Dodge as NJCAA national consolation champions. Brehm accepted an offer to coach the Fort Hays State basketball team after the season and held the position for 12 years.
    Soice played his junior season at Fort Hays under the same coach that took him to the highest of highs in the Juco game. Brehm retired in 1996 from the Kansas Insurance Department.