CHAMPIONSHIP YEAR IN LA FARGE!

As the decade of the 1980’s came to a close, the little Kickapoo River town of La Farge would experience some rare community unity as three LHS teams had great success.  1989 would be a year to remember in La Farge.

In February of that year, the LHS boy’s basketball team captured a conference championship for the first time in 33 years.  The Wildcats, coached by Bob Constalie, won the Ridge & Valley Conference Championship Trophy with a perfect 14-0 record and finished 17-3 for the regular season.  The LHS squad was led by Seniors John Hamilton, Clint Howard and Chris Zahm with juniors Joey Niles and Brian Wheeler rounding out the starting “5”.  Senior Rod Hendrickson and junior Chet Wilson were key contributors off the bench and Tim Coggins, Cory Shird, Chris Vesbach and exchange student Guillaume Caudebec also were on the team.

The La Farge Wildcat squad was able to clinch the school’s first conference championship since 1956 with a 51-36 win at home over Seneca on February 9.  La Farge would finish the season with two more conference wins to conclude the perfect season in the R&V.

The Wildcats kept their dream season going in post-season play by capturing the WIAA regional title with three exciting wins.  La Farge opened tourney play with a 65-41 home win over Boscobel.  In the regional semifinal game played at Hillsboro, the LHS squad used a miraculous fourth quarter comeback to beat R&V Conference foe Desoto 62-55 in overtime.  For the regional final game, the Wildcats would travel to Kickapoo to face the Weston Silver Eagles.

Weston was the two-time reigning R&V champ in boys basketball before the season began, but La Farge pounded the Silver Eagles 61-41 in their first conference meeting played in La Farge.  In the next to last game of the season, and the first game after the Wildcats had clinched the conference title, LHS had won at Weston 53-52 as John Hamilton hit a three-pointer from near half court at the final buzzer.  Weston fans were sure that La Farge could not win a third time over the Silver Eagles. 

But they were wrong. The La Farge Wildcats added a WIAA regional plaque to their season by playing perhaps their best game of the year and pummeled Weston by a score of 76-59.  After the game, the La Farge fire trucks were at the ready to escort the champion Wildcats and their fans back into town as the team enjoyed some victory laps around the village. 

There was little time to get ready for the WIAA sectional opener.  Because of delays caused by earlier snowstorms, the regional final game with Weston had been pushed back to Tuesday night and the sectionals semifinal was to be played on Friday of the same week.  Wildcat fans soon scarfed up all of their allotted 700 tickets for the sectional game to be played at LaCrosse Central.  The Community Pep Rally held on Friday afternoon served as a great sendoff for the team.

Iowa-Grant High School proved to be too tough for the Wildcats and posted a convincing 76-47 win in the sectional semifinal.  (The I-G Panthers went on to pound Fall Creek 80-64 the next night to win the sectional and advance to state.)  Regardless, the community of La Farge had gone “all-in” to show support for their LHS Champs!  It would be one of several occasions in 1989 when the community of La Farge could come together to rally behind their local teams.

When the weather warmed to springtime, the Wildcat baseball team returned to its championship ways by capturing an R&V Conference co-championship with a 6-1 record.  Senior pitcher John Hamilton who posted a 10-2 season record on the mound led Coach Roger Hooker’s La Farge team.  Fellow Senior Clint Howard led the team in batting with a .578 average, while Junior Jason Parr batted .429, Hamilton hit at a .400 clip and fellow Senior Chris Zahm hit .388.  The Wildcats tied for the league title with Desoto.

The Wildcats kept up the winning ways in the post-season as they swept three games to claim the WIAA regional crown.  La Farge beat Bangor 9-7 and Brookwood 19-7 before traveling to far off Pepin to play Pepin-Arkansas in the regional finals.  Behind a strong mound performance by Hamilton, who struck out 13, the Wildcats prevailed by a score of 4-2.  The following week, La Farge lost to defending WIAA Class C champion Greenwood in sectional play to finish their great season with a 14-3 record.

When the new school year began in the fall of 1989, Wildcat fans would have another championship team to cheer on, but this time it was the girls from LHS capturing the trophy.  The LHS volleyball team coached by Gail Hanson captured the first girls’ team trophy in the history of the school by finishing tied for first in the R&V Conference.  Led by all-conference players Erika Thomas and Jo Lynn Deaver, the Wildcats tied with Seneca for the R&V title.  Other Wildcat players included Emma Bader (team MVP), Beth Rolfe (team MIP), Tine Smith, Kari Shird, Dode Smith, Jonel Kiesau, Michelle Donovan and Kelli Hamilton.

A key win in the volleyball season happened when La Farge traveled to Seneca in early October.  The Wildcats were riding an eight match winning streak and had not even lost a set in their previous five matches.  A large contingent of La Farge fans made the trip to Crawford County for the matchup between two undefeated R&V teams.  In the first game, both teams had leads at times, but La Farge prevailed 17-15 behind a strong serving game.  Defending conference champion Seneca then showed what they were made of by winning game #2, 15-0, and amazingly never once lost the service during the entire game.  The third and deciding match was close all the way with both teams playing their best.  Eventually it went to extra points and when the ball hit the floor for the last time and the scoreboard showed that La Farge had won 18-16, pandemonium erupted from the Wildcat team and fans.  It was the first time that La Farge had ever defeated Seneca in volleyball!

A week later, in front of a large crowd in the La Farge gym, the Wildcats clinched a share of the R&V championship by shutting out Ithaca 3-0.  Despite a road loss at Desoto the next week, Coach Hanson and the Wildcats were still happy to receive their conference championship trophy.  The La Farge fire trucks were out again to escort the historic team of girls back to town and the R&V co-champs and their fans celebrated with a victory party at the village hall.

Memories of the "New" Old 1936 Gym at LHS

With the recent reincarnation of the 1936 gymnasium at La Farge Schools back into a usable gym, the memories of times in that place have been flooding back for many of us.  Under the guidance of Al Oaklief, I learned the basics of basketball in that old gym.  When my time to play basketball for La Farge came, it was in that old gym where those first junior high school games were played.  Moving on to my high school years at LHS, I played two seasons in the old gym.

            Oddly, I have few actual memories of the games that I participated in (perhaps caused from my very modest skills at the sport), but I have lots of distant recollections of watching games in that old gym.  As a little kid, our seats for basketball games were in the northwest corner of the 1936 gym on seats made by piling up the sections of the disassembled stage. That stage was rarely used, mainly for student plays, concerts and graduation ceremonies, but when disassembled and stacked in the corner, it was the place for youngsters to view the games.  

            I think I went to some LHS basketball games during the 1955-56 season when my brother Dick played on the Wildcat team in his senior year.  That Wildcat team of 1955-56 arguably had the finest season in school history.  They won every game in their home gym that year, won the Kickapoo Valley Conference title with a 13-1 mark and advanced to sub-sectionals in WIAA post-season play.  That LHS team compiled a 22-2 season mark.  Perhaps being an eight year old at the time, I don’t seem to have any specific recollections about the gym from that season.

            But the next season was a whole different story.  There is one game in that 1956-57 season that stands out for me yet to this day.  My brother Kent played on that team, but my memory is about a shooting exhibition put on by LHS Senior Rod Kennedy.  Rod Kennedy was a prolific scorer for the Wildcats that season.  He scored 30 or more points in fourteen games that season with a high of 42 against Soldiers Grove!  La Farge had a good team that finished second in the KVC and had a season record of 18-4.  The game that I remember was the last home game of the season played against Readstown.  It was a hard fought 67-61 victory for the Wildcats and Rod Kennedy scored 37 points.  I remember that Rod kept shooting fade-away jumpers from the corner right near where we were sitting.  It seemed that we could look right down on Rod as he fell out of bounds just as he released his shot.  And it seemed that they all went in!

            There is another game like that one stuck in my memory from the 1960-61 season.  It was again from the last game of that season in the old gym and the conference champion Soldiers Grove Cardinals had come to La Farge.  Grove had beaten the Wildcats earlier in the season by a score of 89-74, but they had no chance on this night as they ran into a buzz saw named Dean Hamilton.  “Hambone” poured in 37 points and dominated the boards with 27 rebounds in one of the more impressive performances ever played by a Purple & White clad player in that old gym.  LHS won by a score of 80-64.  (I remember that there was a record hop after the game and the scoreboard was left on with that score gleaming through to the dancers below.)  La Farge would finish that season with a 13-6 record.

              Those memories of Wildcat players scoring nearly forty points in a game in the 1936 gym are understandable for the wide-eyed youngster who usually didn’t score forty points in a season.  But perhaps my favorite memory from that old gym are of a shot made by a player who rarely even played in most games.

            It was the 1961-62 season and La Farge did not have a good basketball team.  The Wildcats A-team struggled offensively for most of the year in compiling a season record of 4-14.  I played on the B-team as a freshman that year and that team had a 5-10 mark, so there wasn’t much great happening in the old 1936 gym during that season.  But for one wonderful Friday night on December 1, 1961, the stars in the heavens aligned and the Wildcats were victorious over their downriver foes, the dreaded Viola Bluejackets!

            Up to that point in the young season, La Farge had not won a game at either the B-team or A-team level.  Viola traveled to La Farge with a good team, one that would challenge for the league title before eventually finishing third in the KVC.  The Bluejacket A-team was undefeated for the season, but things would change after that evening.

            To begin, the Wildcat B-team won their first game by defeating Viola by a score of 21-16.  I’m sure that I had nothing to do with the win as I generally played very little, but I do remember the euphoria of that victory.  As the La Farge B-team players poured out of their new locker room, it was all smiles.  We took up seats in the southwest corner bleachers (after all, that’s where the cool high school students sat) to watch the A-Team game.

            La Farge got off to a good start and led 14-8 after the first quarter.  It was still the Wildcats in the lead 22-16 at halftime, but the Bluejackets caught fire in the third quarter.  Viola outscored La Farge 18-10 to take a 34-32 lead heading into the final quarter.  It remained tight for all of that last quarter and Viola was nursing a 42-41 lead as the old round score clock hanging high on the east end of the gym turned red to signal that the end of the game was near.  La Farge had time for one hurried shot and it would come from a very unlikely source.

            Sources vary as to when that fateful last shot was taken.  The account in the story of the game written for “The Windjammer”, the LHS section of the La Farge Enterprise newspaper, said that there was less than thirty seconds left in the game.  In the account of the game written for the 1962 “Memories” yearbook, the time is listed as seven seconds left.  I thought the shot was taken as the game ended, but then I remembered that the Viola team did have an unsuccessful try at a last shot of its own, so that seven seconds is probably right.  Who would take that last shot for La Farge surprised everyone in the old gym that night.

            Floyd Waddell was a nice guy.  Personable, friendly, and good-looking, Floyd was liked by most everyone who ever met him.  However, he was not a good basketball player.  Floyd was a junior on the Wildcat team that season, but he seldom played.  He was forced into action that night against Viola after senior guards Butch Donaldson and Leonard Nottestad fouled out of the game earlier in that last quarter.  As the final seconds to the game ticked away, Floyd was the last person most people expected to shoot.  But as fate would have it, somehow the ball was in Floyd’s hands at the end.  Standing some twenty feet from the basket, he was unguarded so Floyd let fly from the right wing. 

            That shot was not a thing of beauty as Floyd’s shots seldom were, but at this time in the history of the 1936 gym it would shine!  As Floyd’s high arching shot descended, the basketball hit high on the backboard’s right side then caromed straight down through the basket!  To the astonishment of everyone, including Floyd, the bank shot had found its mark to give La Farge a 43-42 win!  The place went nuts – the first win of the season had been accomplished over our biggest rival!  The Viola bluejackets were undefeated no more!  Floyd Waddell was the hero of the night!

            I think that there was a record hop held after the game that night.  I seem to remember sitting up in those bleachers in the southwest corner of the old gym looking down at the dancing couples below.  I think that I can recollect Floyd dancing with his girlfriend (and future wife), Karen Miller, basking in the sweet aura of victory.

            Ironically, that basket in the old gym to beat Viola that night was the only basket that Floyd Waddell scored all season.  It was a rare shot indeed, but it has lasted in my memory to this day.