Gym floor leaves long hoops legacy

    1950 ushered in the era of coach Jack Cotton, who came to Dodge after playing for the Denver Nuggets in 1948 and 1949.
    "I've been blessed all my life and could not have started at a better place than Dodge city High School," said Cotton, who coached the Demons from 1950-1953.     Though Cotton's first year at the helm of the Dodge High basketball program came during a relative trough in terms of wins and league titles, Cotton said he remembers a saying that rang true at Dodge then, as well as in sports in general: "The tide goes out, but it always comes back in again."
    Cotton's teams improved each year under the philosophical head coach. The 1951 season saw the team earn a regular-season mark of 15-8 (good enough for second in the Kansas West-Central League) and another berth in the state tournament, where the Demons lost by only two to Parsons.
    In 1952, Cotton's Demons won their second straight regional tournament, beating Garden City in the finals (after going 18-5 in regular season play this time).
    Cotton's unconventional-at-times coaching methods went along with his player-friendly attitude during games.
    "It got colder than a well-digger's knees in there sometimes, so I got Chief (then-principal Frank Toalson) to buy me a big blanket," said Cotton. "I would wrap players in it when I substituted for them, not only to warm them up, but so that they had to sit next to me and we could talk about the situation on the floor."
    Cotton also said he would tell the players jokes at halftime if the first half had not gone Dodge's way.
    "I'd tell them, 'You guys were the jokers in the first half, so I'll be the joker at halftime,'" Cotton said.
    Fred Day replaced Cotton as Dodge's head coach in 1953 and coached through 1957, winning the regional tournament in his last year. Day also had the pleasure of coaching Dodge City's only basketball All-American. That player, Glen Piper, lettered in Day's final season.
    Piper, who went on to play for the University of Colorado for what he said were "all the wrong reasons," said the unique Dodge High gymnasium gave the Demons a distinct advantage at home games.
    "The crowds were right on top of you," he said. "It was very distracting when the other team was shooting free throws."
    Glen and his older brother Roy, who graduated in 1956, had the chance to play together on the DCHS floor for two seasons. Glen said Roy was always his harshest critic.
    "He would always tell me to shoot the damn ball," Glen said. "Roy was more of a banger on the inside, a pusher and a shover."
    Roy agreed with his brother, however, about the unique advantage that the gym layout gave generations of Demon teams.
    "The balcony around the floor was worth 10 to 15 points a game, because opponents had a real hard time getting the ball in from out of bounds," Roy said. "Especially in the southeast part of the gym, where water pipes hung down to where you really couldn't pass the ball in overhead."
    The Pipers' years marked the last that the Demons played varsity ball in the gym. The Civic Center opened in 1956 and by 1959, all regular-season varsity basketball games were played there.

Stanton’s tournament
    The Tournament of Champions has always been the crown jewel in Dodge City basketball culture. No matter whether the Demons are state championship contenders or in a rebuilding mode, fans have always gotten up for the oldest high school tournament west of the Mississippi River. 
    The tournament originated in 1944, the brainchild of then-Demon head coach Lawrence Stanton and DCHS headmaster Frank Toalson. Dodge City won the tournament in its inaugural year, besting the eight-team field by beating Garden City, Meade and Syracuse.
    Dodge City became the first team to win two TOCs in 1948. Dodge beat upstart Lawrence 35-29 in the finals in what was Lawrence's first year in the tournament.
    However, Wichita East struck back and won three straight tournament titles from 1949-1951, twice beating Dodge in closely contested final games    (41-34 in 1949, 43-42 in 1950).
    Coffeyville, Shawnee Mission, Newton and Hays all won TOC titles before 1956, when the tournament moved to the Civic Center.
    "It's amazing how many smaller schools won games against the bigger schools," said Virginia Pennington, who is married to former DCHS player Chet Pennington.
    Another former Demon, Rex Peterson (class of 1953), added: "We used to sell that place out and then some. In those days, Stanton would go out and recruit the teams he wanted for his tournament based on how many returning players from a good team a school had. I remember people sitting up in the rafters of the gym looking down on the floor to watch the games."
    But fans weren't the only ones who got a bird's-eye view of the action in the DCHS gymnasium during the early years of the TOC. Several Demons-for-life said that Stanton experimented with putting an official up in a stand behind each basket in an attempt to improve the officials' line of sight.
    The innovative tradition apparently stuck.
    Cotton, who coached the Demons in the early 1950s, said, "E.A. Thomas used to get mad at us for doing unusual things like that."
    Thomas was the Kansas State High School Activities Association commissioner while Cotton coached Dodge City. 
    The Piper brothers said one of their greatest memories of TOC came in 1955, when a dust storm hit Dodge during the tournament. The event was immediately dubbed "The Dust Bowl," said the Pipers, and wet sheets had to be hung from every window and doorway just to make the gym playable.
    Though the Civic Center was a more fitting venue for a growing high school basketball program and a burgeoning young tournament, to the truly old-school Dodge City basketball fan, there will never be another place to watch basketball like the old Comanche Street gymnasium.

A national stage
    Perhaps the most overlooked fact about what is now Comanche Intermediate's gym is that before Dodge City Community College's campus was finished in 1970, more than 30 years of Conqs basketball history was housed under that roof as well. When the college opened in 1935, its facilities were limited to the top floor of the high school building. 
    Though records of the first DCCC (then Dodge City Junior College) basketball teams available in the college library's archives are patchy at best, some highlights are still intact. According to "The Genesis of Dodge City Junior College," "Edward E. Kaufman started the basket ball season with a  squad of 13 bucket-men."
    The 1935 team went 4-11, managing wins over Woodward, Okla.; Chillocco, Okla,; Garden City; and Independence Junior Colleges. But the Conqs ended the season on a nine-game losing streak.
    Things picked up during the 1937 and 1938 seasons, when the newly named Conquistadors found Vern "Shorty" Schwertfeger, the team's starting center. He averaged 13.5 points per game in his sophomore season, good enough for second in the K
ansas Junior College Conference.
    In 1939, he went to play for legendary college basketball coach Hank Iba at Oklahoma A&M (which later became Oklahoma State). According to the monthly "Conquistador" newspapers for the 1937-38 school year, the team managed to beat Garden City Junior College and Hutchinson Junior College.
    The 1938 and 1939 seasons saw a new scoring king emerge in forward Bud Grauberger. In 1940, the Conqs were the co-champions of the western division of the Junior College Conference under coach Jasper French.
    New backboards came before the 1940-41 season, and "Conquistador" columnist Don Lamb predicted that the Conqs were "Conference Champs in the Making." But Dodge ended up losing to El Dorado in the semifinals.
    The Conqs fielded DCJC's strongest teams to date in the late '40s  and the early '50s. In 1947, the Conqs won the Junior College Conference Kansas state championship behind efforts from players like Melvin Jones, Bob Crane, Bob Preston and Gene Templeton.
    They were upset by McCook (Neb.) Junior College in the Junior College Conference's regional tournament, but came back with an even stronger squad in 1948 and continued their playoff run all the way to the national juco tournament that year behind first-year coach Herb Bender. According to a 1949 Conquistador newspaper, the Conqs won at least one game against the Campbellsville, Ky., Tigers (65-50 in their first-round game), but the information available concerning the rest of the 1948 season stops there.
    Tyler (Texas) Junior College won the national championship that year.
    According to Charlie Smith, a player on Bender's 1952 and 1953 teams, the Conqs went back to the national Junior College tournament during both his seasons with the ball club.
    By 1955, Bill Cummins was the coach at Dodge City College. His best team came in the 1958 season, when the Conqs were part of a three-way tie for first place in the Kansas league championship with Hutchinson and Arkansas City.
    In those days, regular-season records determined who got into the regional Junior College Athletic Association tournament. If teams were tied for the lead at the end of the season, they were all invited to the regional tournament, and the state championship was hashed out among the teams remaining after the regional tournament was over. 
    The 1958 Conqs lost to Hutchinson in the regional tournament and to Arkansas City in the three-way playoff for state.
    With the Civic Center up and running, Cummins' team moved out of the old gym as Fred Day's high school team had done. As both programs switched to the  more modern venue, they left behind a legacy of several generations of Dodge City basketball.