Holding the ball, rivalries and other gym stories (Part 4)

Part of a series

Back in 2011, coach Andrew Whipple took his Kootenai High boys basketball team to Mullan for a North Star League game on a Saturday night at the Mullan Pavilion.

“Mullan always used to play a zone defense,” Whipple recalled. “As my memory serves, we were holding a 12-point lead going into the fourth quarter and I was getting a little tired of running our zone offense — posts flashing, lots of ball movement around the key, etc. All very boring to me.

“I decided to just have my team hold the ball and see what the Tigers would do,” Whipple said. “I had my players all get out on the perimeter and just pass it back and forth, or dribble the ball in place for 15-20 seconds before passing it. Nothing happened for the first minute or so but after a while the gig was up and things started to get interesting. After about 2 minutes the comments from the crowd began to grow from whispers to roars — everything from ‘That’s not basketball’ to ‘Come on coach, what the $@#* are you doing?’

“Around the 3-minute mark I even started hearing little kid voices behind me in the stands start to make some audibles that sounded familiar to me during my time around soldiers,” Whipple said. “Around the 4-minute mark a plastic bottle bounced off my back and that’s when I knew it was really going to be an enjoyable rest of the evening in Mullan. Finally, after about 4 minutes, the Tigers went into a man-to-man defense and actually started cutting into the lead. As the lead started to dwindle I did a little second-guessing my strategy, but figured I’d done the right thing anyways.”

Whipple said he had never been a fan of zone defense, dating back to the couple of seasons he spent as an assistant coach to Don Dudley in Moscow.

“To coach Dudley, zone defense was the devil and it was never to be fooled around with,” Whipple said. “On a side note, Coach ‘D’ passed away last October. Coach ‘D’ was one of the finest coaches I’d ever worked with and had a tremendous impact on my coaching style, which I later brought to Kootenai. I thought I knew a lot about coaching until I started working for Coach. One day after practice near the beginning of the season back in 2000, he said that I was a ‘neophyte.’ I said thanks because I thought it was a cool-sounding word. After getting home I looked it up and discovered that it meant I had a lot to learn. Working for Coach was like going to coaching graduate school, but I learned to coach the right way.”

Anyway, back to the game ...

“We ended up winning the game and as we rushed to the locker room in the basement I told my team there was no time to shower and we were hitting the road NOW,” Whipple recalled. “Things were a little tense and as I recall there was a ton of snow on the ground. I really didn’t want to give the Mullan folks a chance to stockpile white balls of fury, so we made it to the bus in record time and hit the road.”

IN 2012, one of the most festive non-Fish or non-Prairie Pig spirit game took place at North Idaho College.

It was the 5A Region 1 boys basketball championship game between Post Falls and Coeur d’Alene. The game began at Coeur d’Alene High, the top seed, but a leaky roof was discovered during warmups. The good folks at NIC offered up its gym to the two teams, and fans packed the gym and were whipped into a frenzy by the time the game tipped off, well after 8 p.m.

Post Falls went on to win the game and advanced to state.

“We have always played very well at NIC,” Post Falls coach Mike McLean said. “I think we are 13-1 at NIC since I have been coaching at Post Falls.”

SANDPOINT VS. Coeur d’Alene used to be quite the rivalry.

“We got escorted out of Coeur d’Alene one time” in the early 1980s, recalled Bill Adams, who was coaching the Sandpoint boys basketball team at the time.

Apparently the two schools’ student bodies were getting after each other as well.

“We had to put the coats up on the windows in case anything came through the windows,” Adams said. “They took us down to Prairie and up to (U.S.) 95 and out that way.”

SPEAKING OF Sandpoint vs. Coeur d’Alene ...

“I remember in 1968-69 season, we were playing Coeur d’Alene at NIC’s gym,” recalled Duane Ward, who was Sandpoint’s boys basketball coach at the time. “We ended up winning the game 61-60, and it went down to the wire. And I remember (Coeur d’Alene coach) Dean (Lundblad), he was over at the scorer’s table, and he was arguing with the refs, and I told my assistant at the time (Ken Beaudoin), I said, ‘You need to go over there and make sure they don’t change anything.”

Meanwhile, Ward went to look out for his players.

“I’m going into the locker room, because when our kids were going into the locker room, stuff was coming down out of the stands on them, back when we really had a heavy rivalry with them. I wanted to make sure (the Bulldog players were OK), and I wanted to make sure nothing was changed at the scorer’s table, because it came down to a last-second shot, and the controversy was, whether or not it counted.”

“The rivalry was pretty strong back in those days,” Ward recalled. “And I’m not sure Sandpoint was much better when Coeur d’Alene came to Sandpoint.”

COACHES: If you are a current or former coach in North Idaho, and have stories you’d like to share of crazy bus trips, humorous encounters with officials (or umpires) or bizarre occurences during games, feel free to email me at mnelke@cdapress.com

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2019, or via email at mnelke@cdapress.com. Follow him on Twitter@CdAPressSports.