Oh Those Trojans

By Paulette Tobin (1/9/00)

Last night our daughter Emily played in her high school pep band at a hockey match. I don't even know who they played, which should give you some idea of how much I know or care about sports these days. I am the person who comes in on the tail end of the conversation to ask: "Oh, is the Super Bowl this weekend? Who's playing?"

It wasn't always that way. In the late 1960s and early 1970s when boys' basketball was THE school sport in Eureka I was one of those fans who lived and died for our Trojans. I actually kept scrapbooks all through high school in which I clipped every single thing written and every photograph of the Trojans football and basketball teams ever published in the Northwest Blade and Aberdeen American-News. I pitched all those scrapbooks during a cleaning frenzy in about 1982, an action I've regretted a time or two.

My parents also enjoyed sports so we didn't miss many games, football or basketball, even the out-of-town ones, and we usually saw both the A and B basketball teams play. My Dad believed in getting his moneys worth - if he was going to buy a ticket, he was going to see both games.

Football games were fun, too, if you could keep from freezing. I know our junior year it rained about every Friday night and our cheering section resembled nothing more than a bunch of drowned rats. In 1969, 1970 and 1971 our football team either took the conference championship, or tied for it. Those were the days before the Dakota Dome and high school football play-offs, so that was the highest honor our team could attain. Our senior year the Trojans took second in the conference after a loss to Leola

Our basketball team went to the state tournament twice when I was in high school, first in 1971 and then in 1972. In 1971 it had been 23 years since Eureka had played in a state tournament, even though there had been some great teams in between.

One of those great teams was in 1966, which included seniors Gary Dockter, Randy Bertsch and Mel Kary; juniors Dave Bauer, Tim Weber and Clark Holzworth; and Clark's brother, Willie, a sophomore. Eureka, coached by Bill Wheeler, had a 24-game win streak going when it was upset 51-46 by Cheyenne-Eagle Butte in the Regional Tournament finals in Aberdeen. The Regional Tournament was unusual that year. Because of the great three-day blizzard that hit in early March 1966, the entire tournament had to be played in one day. Perhaps this had something to do with the outcome.

In 1971 the Trojans were led by seniors John Mehlhoff, Carey Lapp, Vaughn Kary, Craig Pleinis, Bob Dockter, James Schaeffer and Gary Wolff. Our classmate, Steve Fuchs, was one of the starting five that year and several other classmates, including Wayne Frey, Dave Harr, Gary Krein, Lance Neuharth and Jim Gebhardt, divided their time between the varsity and junior varsity teams. Juniors Ross Mehlhoff, Gahlen Pleinis and Loren Hieb rounded out the team, which was coached by Jim Haar and Earl Martell.

Up until sometime in the late 1960s the district tournament often was played in the EHS gym, which would be absolutely packed to the rafters including people standing 10 deep in the lobby, craning their necks to see the games. By the time we were in high school, both the district and regional tournaments were played at the Aberdeen Civic Center.

In 1971 the Class B boys basketball tournament was the premiere high school sports event in South Dakota and was played at Sioux Falls Arena. I was 15 at the time, and the Arena was the biggest building I had ever been in. Perhaps the boys who were playing basketball there felt the same way, because they lost in the first round to Dell Rapids, then won in consolation, then lost their third game, taking sixth place.

In 1972 the Trojans went back to the Big B and came back as consolation champs. 1973, unfortunately, turned out to be another one of those "what might have been" years as the Trojans once again were upset in the regional finals, this time by Bowdle. What a heart breaker that was. Charlie Schock and I were talking about that game on-line today and he said: "We had the best team and we lost. It was a lesson for life."

At EHS the "jocks" often were the top of the social echelon in high school, in addition to being admired and celebrated by half the town. And for many girls, there was no higher glory than being chosen as a cheerleader. The competition, and the pressure, could be brutal. In 1993, when we celebrated our 20-year-class reunion, our classmate Joni Lapp told us about an essay she'd read in "Working Woman" magazine called "Everything You Need to Know about Business you Learn from Cheerleading Tryouts." According to the author, Lynn Snowden, being rejected as a potential cheerleader was "probably the single most character-molding moment of adolescence." No future rejection, she wrote, "will ever match the level of public humiliation and institutionalized cruelty of cheerleader tryouts." For that matter, what must it have been like to be the basketball player who blew the big shot, or who committed the crucial foul, or the football player who fumbled at the goal line?

Still, I have plenty of fun memories of those days. For instance:

--The Eureka pep band, which was awesome, played between games and at halftime. I remember watching they guys run their pre-game drills and the cheerleaders doing their warm-ups while listening to "The Horse." And who can forget the drill team girls in their short red dresses and white knee-high vinyl boots shaking their pompoms to "School's Out" by Alice Cooper?

--I remember a game in Aberdeen in 1971 against McIntosh in which the Trojans were so far ahead that Coach Haar had the second and third teams playing the last period of the game. John Mehlhoff, Vaughn Kary, Carey Lapp, and whoever else was sitting on the bench decided it would be funny to cross and uncross their legs in unison, much to the amusement of the crowd. Were they cocky or what? Also there was a certain player on the McIntosh team who appeared to be much older than high-school age. The joke was that he was so old, he had kids on the B team.

--I remember a game when we were seniors when Lance Neuharth swished a flying one-handed shot he lobbed from the other team's free throw line, just as the third-period buzzer sounded. Don't remember who the other team was, but I know we won.

--I remember driving all the way to Highmore, Britton and Gettysburg for basketball games, then standing outside in a crowd waiting to get into the gym. Some of those auditoriums, like Gettysburg's for instance, were glorified cracker boxes.

--Sioux Falls was the biggest city I had ever seen when I attended the State B tournament there in 1971. I was 15 years old, and it was the first time I had ever eaten at a McDonald's restaurant.

Even for dedicated fun-lovers like me and my friends in the Class of '73, the state tournaments were unrivaled for their parties. But that's a topic for another column.

(Paulette Haupt Tobin graduated from EHS in 1973 and from SDSU in 1977. Today she lives in Grand Forks, N.D., where she is a reporter for the Grand Forks Herald. You can email her at [email protected])