The following is a feature first published in the Wellington Daily News in March, 1997 that celebrated the 50th anniversary of the state championship basketball team. The team will be honored Friday, Feb. 12 at halftime. Ernie Barrett, a member of that basketball team, will also be honored before the game with a reception and book signing from 4 to 6 p.m. at Kelley Edgar's facility on 117 N. Washington.
by Tracy McCue
Basketball in Wellington.
Those are three words that don't exactly strike terror in the heart of your average sports fan.
Wellington's a football town — from the roaring 1920s to the tech savvy 2000s. Name a decade, and football rules.
Success in basketball in Wellington comes in short spurts and has always been fleeting.
But there is one exception.
Sitting there lonely on the high school gymnasium wall is a banner that reads, "1947 — Class 2A Basketball State Champions."
And what a state championship team it was.
It was 1947 —
Wellington was a prospering Midwestern town, blessed with a strong agricultural base, a thriving railroad industry and a fledgling group of aircraft companies which would eventually make a few good citizens imminently wealthy.
And like every town and city across America in 1947, Wellington was celebrating a triumphant return from World War II. The town was in a prosperous mood and had a renewed sense of purpose.
It also had a pretty good basketball team.
Before that time, Wellington basketball success was nil with just one girls basketball state championship to show for its efforts in the early 1920s.
And Wellington was a member of the old Ark Valley League — considered then to be the top tier basketball league in the state. Newton to the north was a perennial state champion juggernaut. Ark City to the east was always very, very good.
Wellington, like so often before and since, was the "also-ran" team.
But for some reason in the mid-1940s, it all came together for Wellington. The team would possess two eventual college All-Americans, two other eventual college basketball players, and support personnel that could make any coach envious.
And after a 1946 season in which Wellington finished third in state — its highest finish ever — the Crusaders were returning everybody.
"We knew we were good all through school," said the late Gerald Rogers in 1997, who was an attorney for Rogers Abstract in Wellington. "We just didn't go around bragging about it."
G. Rogers was the "spark plug" for the team as eventual Texas A&M Coach John Floyd referred to him — a guard with good ball handling skills and the ability to keep the team fired up.
He didn't score a lot. That responsibility fell into the hands of his twin brother: Harold. H. Rogers eventually became an All-American at Oklahoma A&M — now Oklahoma State.
H. Rogers was known as the "blond bomber," and was hailed in those days as "the greatest all-around performer since West Point graduate Dale Hall blazed the trail at Parsons," the Wellington Daily News trumpeted in those days.
He shared scoring duties at the forward spot with Ernie Barrett, who became an All-American basketball player at Kansas State.
Maybe it was the stars, but All American basketball players don't come along every day — especially in Wellington. Yet in 1947, Wellington had two of them, who happened to live on the same block — two who would eventually play against one another in the NCAA College Basketball Tournament's Final Four.
"We all grew up together playing basketball," said H. Rogers, who is an attorney in Wichita Falls, Tex. "We played some of our greatest games there at Washington grade school."
"It was a different time and basketball was our lives," Barrett said. "If we had a foot of snow, the very next day we would clean it off and play hoops. I don't know if kids would do that today."
Eddie Howell bogged up the middle as a 6-2 center and Buddy Tomlins, standing at 5-10, was the other guard.
The support cast consisted of Warren Arspiger, John Gasper, Don Raine, Jerry Smith, Jack Templeton and Jerry Wilson.
Going into the 1946-47 season, the puzzle pieces were in place for what would be one great state championship ride. But there was one hitch.
Wellington needed a coach.
A void filled —
In 1946, Cade Suran was a likable sort, who loved to play a fast-paced, firebrand kind of basketball and after leading Wellington to a Class 2A third-place finish made up mostly of underclassmen, he had every intention of coaching the Crusaders again.
Trouble is, opportunity knocked. Fort Hays State University was looking for a head coach and Suran was its man.
"I remember Suran getting us boys together and telling us the bad news," Wilson said, who wound up being a coach himself. "He said, 'Boys I hate to leave, because you have it. But this is a job I can't pass up."
Suran went on to coach 18 years at FHSU with an impressive 258-138 record.
So Wellington started searching and found a young assistant, John Floyd, who was coaching freshman ball under the legendary Henry Iba at Oklahoma A&M.
Floyd, who was raised in Argonia, said he wasn't looking to be a high school coach, but after being approached by Forrest Rogers, Harold and Gerald's dad, and with enough coaxing, he accepted the WHS job.
Floyd was no Suran.
"For one thing he was meanest son-of-a-bitch I ever knew," joked Howell, who considered Floyd a lifetime friend.
Floyd was a hard worker and if you were working for him, you were too.
He instantly made the town people mad by holding practice on Thanksgiving Day — twice. And he did it again on Christmas day.
"Everybody was mad, but the players," G. Rogers said.
He changed the system from fast break to slow churning and the senior-dominated Crusaders were like starting from scratch.
"I think at first it hurt me because I liked to shoot and under Floyd's style only Ernie and Harold were supposed to shoot," Wilson said. "But John Floyd taught defense, and I became a defensive oriented coach because of him."
G. Rogers joked that Wellington had a mandatory policy on offense, pass six times, no matter what, before shooting.
"Coach Floyd was the finest coach in the state of Kansas," H. Rogers said. "He brought discipline, defense, and finesse to our team. He was the major and overwhelming reason for our success and state championship."
The season begins —
Wellington opened its golden season by splitting two games with Capitol Hill High in Oklahoma City.
Then the WHS team returned to play for the first time in the plush downtown Memorial Auditorium.
Up to that point, Wellington played in what is now called the junior high gymnasium.
But because of the popularity of the team, it was moved to the bigger auditorium — and it was packed at every Crusader home game. It was not uncommon to see people get a seat two hours before tipoff.
After Oklahoma City, Wellington played like stream-rollers, squashing the likes of Winfield, Ponca City and El Dorado before winning a double overtime game with Wichita North.
That led to an away contest with defending state champion Newton — the premiere team in the state.
With hundreds of Wellington fans making the trip, the Crusaders shot to the top of the rankings with a convincing 45-36 win. It was the first win over the Railroaders since 1936.
They say every team has its peaks and valleys, and Wellington slipped into a hole on a sub-zero degree January night.
Wellington traveled to Ark City in what turned out to be the first of four contests between these two powerhouses.
H. Rogers remembers it well.
"It's the only game, I ever heard of where a team was willing to play five-on-four," H. Rogers said. "(Ark City) left one man standing under the basket the whole game, and played a four-man zone defense on the other end."
The game plan worked with Ark City winning 29-28.
H. Rogers said he has watched countless games since and has never seen it done again. Even in the three other games that year Ark City played Wellington, it didn't go with that defense.
"I don't know why. It worked," H. Rogers said.
Still, Wellington had a chance to win with G. Rogers hitting a last-second shot at the buzzer. It didn't count because of a controversial foul.
Wellington then lost to Wichita East, dropping the Crusaders from the top of the AVL standings, and eventually costing them the league championship.
But adversity didn't stay long. Wellington whipped Hutchinson, Winfield, Blackwell, Wichita North, El Dorado and in the highly-touted rematch with Newton, stuffed the Railroaders, 41-26, in front of a packed Memorial Auditorium home.
The Crusaders finished the regular season with wins over Ark City and East before losing to Hutchinson in the final game. Going into the Class 2A regional tournament at Memorial, Wellington was sitting pretty with a 15-4 record.
The post-season almost ended before it started for Wellington. The Crusaders, who defeated Winfield on two previous occasions, had to come from behind to beat the Vikings 31-27, winning in the final minute.
The regional championship between Ark City and Wellington was another classic with both teams tied at 32-all at the end of the third quarter. The Crusaders then went on a 9-point romp using great floor play by Howell. H. Rogers finished the game with 19 points.
Wellington's return to the Class 2A state tournament in Emporia was no surprise to anybody and the Crusaders brought a crowd with them.
They did not disappoint, burying Dodge City in the first round, 54-32.
The quarterfinal game saw Wellington pound Lawrence 38-25 and in the semifinal game the Crusaders qualified for its first state championship game with a 31-26 win over Shawnee Mission.
It was only fitting that Wellington would secure its only state boys basketball championship against it longest and oldest rival, Ark City — who was considered the Cinderella of the tournament.
The Bulldogs, the only regional runner-up to receive a bid to the state tournament that year, had beaten Great Bend, Topeka and Newton.
But Wellington was too much. There was no four-on-five and no Bulldog victory as Wellington took an early 23-16 lead and went on to win 38-30.
The town went nuts.
Everyone who was interviewed for this story remembers the parade coming back from Emporia more vividly than the actual state tournament game itself.
A line of 50-or-so cars met the team bus near Riverdale and escorted it into town with honks and voices of approval. And 500 people all gathered in Memorial Auditorium to listen to the game one more time on the radio.
All the boys were treated to many free milkshakes at many of Wellington's drugstores of the day.
There was nothing else going on in Wellington that day or probably for the rest of the week.
The future was now —
It's hard to tell whether the success in 1947 inevitably brought future success to these young men's lives, or if it was a case of successful people making 1947 happen.
It was probably a little of both.
"I believe everything goes in cycles," Barrett said. "We just happened to have great athletes at the time, and the character to get the job done."
Fifty years later, the 1947 team looks like it belongs on a Who's Who list.
What other high school basketball team produced a state championship, three attorneys, two electrical engineers, an athletic director for a major university and professional basketball player, three successful businessmen, a high school principal with a Ph. D, a successful high school football/basketball coach, and a coach that eventually led a major university program for five years?
Barrett may have taken the most famous route. After being heavily recruited by OSU, Colorado and Kansas, he went to Kansas State and played under Tex Winter, now a Chicago Bulls assistant.
After getting K-State to the Final Four in 1951, Barrett became an All-American and was drafted by the Boston Celtics and played under Red Auerbach. He returned to K-State to coach and eventually became athletic director from 1969-76.
H. Rogers went to Oklahoma A&M after serving a stint in the U.S. Infantry. He too became an All-American basketball player and helped lead the Cowboys to the same Final Four in 1951. He went on to law school at the University of Denver and became a tax litigation lawyer in Wichita Falls, Texas.
G. Rogers got a scholarship at Oklahoma A&M to play basketball. Although he played little there, it did eventually lead him to a degree from the University of Kansas Law School. He was a practicing attorney in Wellington until his death.
Howell moved to California and got a degree in mathematics from West Coast Engineering School. He was an engineering manager for a wire and cable industry and was back working after a two-year retirement in 1997.
Wilson played ball at Butler Community College and baseball at Wichita University. He became a head coach at Edna, Kans., and after coaching stints in three other schools, returned to Wellington where he eventually became a head boys basketball coach.
Raine spent 25 years in Aerospace Industry, Honeywell and LTV. He also was an owner of a city equipment dealership in Seminole, Fla.
Dr. Gasper attended K-State and got a B.S. in history, a M.S. degree in education at Wichita State and Ph.D. in education from Wyoming. He was a principal for Wichita Northwest High School.
Smith went to the University of Kansas law school and eventually became a trial attorney at Flagstaff, Ariz.
Tomlins was a salesman for a typewriter/computer company in Salina.
Templeton left for the U.S. Army before returning to Wellington working for Hunter Milling Co. He eventually became a forman for Cargill Elevators. He retired and lived in Texas during the winter.
Arnspiger received an electrical engineering degree at KU and became a development engineering manager for AT&T in Worthington, Ohio.
Coach Floyd coached Wellington to two more state tournament berths in 1948 and 1949. He then spent one year as head coach at Little Rock (Ark.) Junior College before securing the head coaching job at Texas A&M.
He said he had two good teams and three weaker teams in his five years coaching there.
Floyd then worked in parks and recreation and retired in Stillwater, where he periodically went to OSU games with his old buddy H. Rogers.
"It was a great bunch of kids," Floyd said in 1998. "They worked hard and practiced hard. A lot of them received a college education that they probably wouldn't have otherwise."
It's almost impossible to think of another state championship team quite like the one in 1947.
Wellington, Kan. —
