Gayle Hoover

From First Person, Legendary South Dakota Sports Stories, by Mike Henriksen, copyright, Mariah Press, 2018

MIKE: We are going to talk to a gentleman who’s a member of several Halls of Fame, Gayle Hoover joins us. Gayle, thanks so much for joining us.

GAYLE: Well this is really an honor. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to an old coach.

MIKE: We’ll get into that. I want to go back even further though, Gayle. Where did you grow up?

GAYLE: In Sioux Falls. Basically in Sioux Falls. I went through system there at Whittier and Washington High School.

MIKE: And when did you decide coaching was going to be a good way to go for you?

GAYLE: In my senior year. After the summer of my senior year, I was working at Morrell’s, and looking forward to going into the Air Force or something. After the summer was over and Ike (Hoover, his brother)gave me a call and said “How would you like to go to college?” And I said, “boy it sure sounds better than what I’m doing now.” So we went out and met with Coach Tinsworth. And in two days we were in college.

MIKE: That’s not exactly the most profound recruiting story I’ve ever heard, Gayle.

GAYLE: No, no. And they weren’t getting that much either because by that time we weren’t too well known in our sport.

MIKE: So growing up in Sioux Falls, you took part in just about every sport, didn’t you coach?

GAYLE: Yes. Yes, I was not very good in track, and I played a little bit in football in junior high. After that, I just went strictly for basketball.

MIKE: And what was it about basketball that drew you to it?

GAYLE: The ball kept going in. And it kind of surprised me and I thought ‘hey, maybe I can be good at this.’

MIKE: Tell me about your high school basketball, coach.

GAYLE: Coach Diehl. You know, I find that the older I get, this happens to a person. You know some people are known as Wally, and some people are known as Coach Diehl. And Coach Diehl will always be Coach Diehl to me. I had some great coaches. I had Doug Evans, was one of them there. Mr. Grant Heckenlively was one of my coaches there. Arnie Bauer. I had a good group of people who gave you just nothing but support and encouragement. The only time I had negative experience is when I was a freshman. And Doug Evans was officiating one of our scrimmages and I must have said something to him. And he turned around to me and says, “Gayle, the day that you can play and referee at the same time, you’ll be quite a ballplayer”. I never forgot that.

MIKE: I don’t know who said it first. But I think the guy that I’m most familiar with saying it was John Egan, the longtime sportswriter. He said that everyone deserves to have someone in their life that they can call “Coach”, and that they will call “Coach” for the rest of their life. And you had that with Wally Diehl.

GAYLE: I certainly did. I certainly did. He was a great influence.

MIKE: So tell me about the University of Sioux Falls, or at the time, Sioux Falls College.

GAYLE: Well, that was something else. We got started with the season, the first ball game. And Ike Hoover was right with me all the time, going through this process. And I got into the game. I think it was about two minutes to go. All of a sudden the ball started going through the hoop, and I ended up I think with 18 points and I started the next 93 ballgames.

MIKE: That is phenomenal.  Now, I want to go back for just a moment because I asked about growing up. Tell me about your family.

GAYLE:  I have a brother and two sisters, and luckily we’re all still living.

MIKE: And tell us about Ike. What’s the age difference there?

GAYLE: About a year. I think he spent about a half a year at Augustana before we got together and decided, well, we’re going to go to Sioux Falls College. But if you remember Ike’s background, he was a tremendous quarterback for Washington High School during Bob Burns’ good years. Real good years, when they had the long winning string and everything. He was with me the next four years. In fact he was with me for the next 35 years because both of us had the concessions stands out at the softball diamonds at Pay Wyman Fields. So we were with each other quite a bit.

MIKE: One of the things that you and I have seen during our lifetime, andyou even more so than me, is the explosion of women’s athletics. Were your sisters good athletes that just didn’t have a chance to compete?

GAYLE: I’ll never know because you’re right, they did not have any chance to compete. In fact my daughters just got in on it a little bit. They were both in golf, and Nancy was a basketball player for Parker. But they were just getting through school when it really was becoming part of the scene.

MIKE: So it’s not like your sisters were taking on you and Ike out in the driveway playing basketball.

GAYLE: No that was not the case.

MIKE: You talked about that run at Sioux Falls College at the time. So the ball starts going in, and the ball just kept going in. Who were some of your teammates during that time?

GAYLE: Well let’s see. There was Ike and Jim Fett, Gene Masheek, Alan Spock, Don Renner, Kenny Anderson, and  Linus Pickard. That was our nucleus.

MIKE: And was that in the old SDIC? Is that who you competed against?

GAYLE: Yes. All the records and so forth that I happen to hold there are in the SDIC. That’s why it’s kind of sad when they go from one conference to another because you say, ‘hey, that’s a buried conference. That’s gone.’

MIKE: Tell me about the SDIC in those days, because those were really the heydays of those rivalries.

GAYLE: Oh, that was great. And you know the one that probably was on the top of the heap all the time was Northern. Coach Bob Wachs up there, he had a machine. They were tough. Now we didn’t win an awful lot of ball games during that span of time, but we competed pretty good. But sometimes we had to hold the ball so they didn’t get a hundred. But that’s just part of it. And you know, we were playing in old Pierce Gym, and that’s a real small court with warped boards. It was kind of hard for visiting teams to come in and play. But this is where we played. So we had a better chance when we were at home.

MIKE: I believe that. I’ve had a chance to talk to some of the folks through the course of the years that played for Coach Wachs. What people mostly saw about Coach Wachs in a public manner what seemed to be outlandish style of coaching. What was it like to play against Coach Wachs?

GAYLE: I have got a story you would love on Coach Wachs. They were down at our place, and he was doing his screaming and yelling and jumping up and fired up with his kids. And he was hollering at them, and I thought, ‘boy, the way he’s at em right now, this is would be a good time to call a timeout so they’d have to go over and listen to him.’ So I called a timeout and the coach asked me, “what did you need?” And I said, “no, I don’t need anything.” But I said, “those guys over there are catching it.”

MIKE: During you college career, back in those SDIC days, who were some of the toughest guys? You mentioned Northern. Who were some of the individuals, whether on Northern or on some of the other squads that you were competing against?

GAYLE: Well, the first name that would hit me would be Gordy Fodsness.

MIKE: That’s not a bad place to start.

GAYLE: No, he was up at Dakota Wesleyan and he held the record for the most points in the conference, and he was a real leader. Some players down at Southern. Bob Rummel up in Madison was tough. Poppens up in Madison was tough. I played forward and center and Marskey from Aberdeen was 6-10, and I was 6-1 so that was quite a matchup that we had there.

MIKE: You were able to score. You’re 6-1, playing either power forward or center. How on earth were you able to score on those guys the way you did?

GAYLE: Ike would set a screen, and we didn’t have the three-pointer in those days, but most of my scoring was done on jump shots. They were usually 15, 16 feet from the basket I suppose. That, and I was a little quicker inside than the big guys and that helped me too.

MIKE: Gayle, we don’t see kids who can hit midrange jump shots anymore, do we? That’s really a lost art, isn’t it?

GAYLE: It is, and you know when I talk to kids and talk to basketball players I tell them, the whole game of basketball is won 13 feet from the basket. It doesn’t have to be the 21, 22-footer. But I tell them 13-feet from the basket. If you can consistently shoot from that range, you’re going to win a lot of ball games. And you know, Fred Tibbetts (Sioux Falls Roosevelt), this is something that his teams could always do. Between seven and 13 feet, this is where they won their ball games. And I think that’s where he had his consistency down through the years.

MIKE: I’m with you on that, and also the high post passing that Fred incorporated was ahead of its time when it came to the girl’s side of things.

GAYLE: That’s exactly right. Yes.

MIKE: So as you went off to college, did you always have in mind that you were going to be a coach?

GAYLE: No, not until I got registered. And when we registered, I thought, ‘boy, I’d think I’d like to be a basketball coach.’ And then all of the sudden they said, “you will also have to teach.” And I never realized that. I said, “hey, I just want to be a basketball coach. I don’t want to teach anything.” So I went into Sciences then, and I taught biology and health for 40 years.

MIKE: So Gayle you get out of college. You wrap up your college career, and it’s time to find that coaching and teaching position. What was that like?

GAYLE: I first starting looking, and I thought I’d like to find a school that has a little bit of a history for basketball. And so I interviewed at three or four different places, and then all of a sudden I got this opportunity to go over to Minnesota. So I went over there for one year, and just really was not happy. I didn’t know anyone. You go to a meeting and didn’t know a soul. You’re a couple hundred miles away from your family. So we spent one year over there, and after that we moved back to Parker. And I spent the next 49 years there, 34 of them coaching.

MIKE: What did you learn in that first year of coaching and teaching?

GAYLE: Well, that it wasn’t as easy as it looked, number 1. And that it was a lot of involvement in people. And you know as a player, all you’re doing is going out there and playing and having a great time. But when you’ve got the responsibility of these 15 kids, and their 15 sets of parents, it’s an altogether different type of a thing. That’s what I think I learned the first year, more than anything else was the responsibility. You’re working with these young personalities and these young kids that all have these desires to do the best they can and you have to guide them and you have to be open minded enough to help them. That was my first lesson. Since then, I have tried to build on that all through my career as coach. Each one of them is different and you don’t have one team like the next one. If I coached for 34 years, I coached 34 different types of kids and different systems because you have to bend with them. Especially when you’re in high school, and you’re in a small high school. You’re not going to have some All Americans come in every year. Like they used to say at Washington High School, if you had to duck when you came through the door, you were part of the basketball team. Well if that would have been my case, I never coached very many big kids. The comradery that you have and the learning experience with each one of them is something that you’ll never forget. And any coach that’s in there for the money, or anybody that’s in there for the glory, you can forget that. But if you’re in there when the kid comes out of there and he gives you a hug or something and has done the best he can, that’s the reward.

MIKE: You have to be extremely proud of the fact that so many of your former players went into coaching themselves, and became successful coaches.

GAYLE: Well talk about two successful coaches, the Flynn brothers. Kelly Flynn and Ron Flynn. And Ron Flynn as everybody knows was down at Wakonda through that 105 winning streak. And then Kelly was down in South Sioux, Nebraska and if you go down there I think he could be governor or whatever he wants. Because this guy every year has put some kind of a championship on the wall down there. If you ever go down there, if you’ve ever been there, it’s quite an arena that he has with great big life-size pictures all the way around of the state championship teams year after year. I guess Kelly would be the most successful. But some of the other kids that I’ve coached, I’m just really proud of them in every field. Quite a few of them were doctors, and that kind of surprises me. Lee Stoddard up there in Madison did a tremendous job when he was there. But they were all good kids. And of all the coaching that I’ve done, I can’t look back and say, ‘boy that was a bad team.’ Or, ‘that was a bad kid.’ There wasn’t such a thing. You just treated them different and respected them.

MIKE: I had forgotten that Lee Stoddard was from Parker. I’ve known Lee for a hundred years but of course I’ve only known him from Madison.

GAYLE: He was quite a basketball player. He was one of these big clumsy kids as an eighth grader and you wondered if he’d ever do anything. By the time he was a sophomore, I had to come up with different things for him to do in practice every night because he got real handy underneath the basket.

MIKE: Another friend of mine who I literally met in high school at a University of Nebraska basketball camp, Mike Begeman?

GAYLE: Oh yes. Mike is a story in itself. When Mike was in grade school he was about 5-4. And I can remember his eighth grade year I was talking to him in the gym and he said, “I’m going to be playing basketball for you next year, Coach.” And I said, “well I’ll tell you this. I’ve never started a kid less than 5-6, so you’re going to have to grow.” And he says, “I’ll do it.” And that’s exactly what he did. When he came back he was 5-8 and he was ready to play. But what a competitor. And the thing is, he had to take a lot of guff from all the other teams that we played, but he was really a leader and just a super human being.

MIKE: And again, that showed up in his coaching career too. He had another very successful coaching career.

GAYLE: Yes he did. He did a good job.

MIKE: Over the course of those 34 years in Parker, how did the parents change?

GAYLE: Well, you know, the key to parent is winning. If you want to keep parents off your back, you just win. And we were very fortunate that we were doing a little more of that than losing. We had great parents. Just super parents. In 34 years, I had one phone call in 34 years. That was because his boy wasn’t playing in this certain ball game. We were ahead 24-2 and I took the whole firsts string out, and then I played them a little bit in the second half and then that was it. I got a call saying, “I want my boy to go to college. He can’t go to college if he’s sitting on the bench.” And I told him, I said, “hey when we’re ahead like that he’s going to be sitting on the bench. If this doesn’t fall into what you expect, I guess we’re going to have to part company.” About three days later I got another call and this was just a complete reverse. The whole apology bit. In 34 years I just had that one, that was concerned about being put on the bench when we were ahead.

MIKE: Today though Gayle, I know coaches that get calls from parents once a week. We’ve got some really good young teachers and coaches out there. But I worry that they’re not going to stay with it because of that aspect.

GAYLE: And they won’t. I don’t know what the life expectancy of a coach is now. You go to the (Gary) Munson’s and the (Burnell) Glanzer’s and (Larry) Lutjens and people that have been around for 34-35 years . There’s not that many of those guys around anymore. They get in there and they’ll be coaches for five-six years at the most. And then you’re right, they’re tired of it. They just don’t feel they don’t need to take that guff, and I agree with them.

MIKE: When did you know it was time to step down from coaching basketball?

GAYLE: I had a super assistant for years, Dave Fuller. He was from Armour. He played ball for Armour and he was my assistant for about six-seven years or so. And I wasn’t feeling the greatest at that time and I thought, ‘well, boy, now’s the time to do this”. I had some real good kids coming. I’ve got next year, there will be at least five over 6-3 and I’ve never had that before. And I thought, ‘well this is a good time to get out.’ And Dave is still there and I knew he would be able to take over. So that last year in ’93 we were 18-2 when I left the ranks. I just felt it was it. I had a good friend over in Minnesota, Hugo Galey. He had the most wins in that state and I had the most wins in over in this state and we were good friends. He talked to me one time, and he said, “Gayle, I’ve resigned from teaching a year ago but I stayed with it and coached one more year. And it was terrible.” He said the kids didn’t respect you. The faculty kind of resented you just coming and practicing and so forth. And he said, “don’t stay too long.” And I thought, ‘boy that’s good advice.’

MIKE: No question. That’s good advice no matter what the career I think. So what did you miss most? What was the biggest adjustment for you, Gayle?

GAYLE: Tuesdays and Friday. Oh, I love the competition. Love the competition. I didn’t miss the long hours. I didn’t miss being away from the family, scouting all the time. I didn’t miss the two-weeks at Christmas time when you had a so-called vacation. But I did miss Tuesdays and Fridays when the competition was there.

MIKE: You mentioned your family. Over that course of that time you had yourself a wife and a family too. They had to have been very supportive through the years.

GAYLE: Oh, definitely. You know, Clarky and I have been together for 55 years. If there is a special place in heaven for coaches’ wives, she better get a membership, I’ll tell you that because she put up with us. I suppose sitting in the stands, wondering why that dumb coach does what he does, but she took it. And then we had three girls, and now I have six grandchildren.  Abby  a freshman up at Dakota Wesleyan. She’s playing basketball up there. Loren Kunz is a junior out at Roosevelt and I’m looking for big things for her this year because she’s really a good basketball player. But she’s got the mentality of a Mike Begeman. That’s the way she works. So I’m hoping that she’ll have a good year at Roosevelt. And then one’s a teacher and one’s a nurse and then I have one in the Marines. They’ve been a real blessing. You know, Mike, I really lived in a good time. I grew up in high school in the 50s, I went to college in the 50s. Those were a great ten years. Just a great, great span of time to be in Sioux Falls because everything was not as complicated as it is today. But that was just a good time. The parents were really supportive. The administration was supportive. And we didn’t have a lot of money in our athletic fund but we did have enough money to do a few things that they’re having a very difficult time doing today. We didn’t have a lot of clubs. We didn’t have a lot of sponsorship from the kids themselves having to pay to play. And so, those were some good years for coaching and good years to have a career.

MIKE: No question about it. So Gayle, do you ever find yourself still coaching?

GAYLE: Oh yes. Every once in a while you’ll find me over at the Wellness Center here with Lauren and we’re going through a lot of the things that I really believed in. I try to get into her head more than just the Xs and Os and more than just putting the ball through the hole. The whole concept of basketball and teamwork and what you learn from it and what you get from your teammates. I tell her so many times that what you learn, and practice, on the bus, during games, you can’t find that any other place. I say you need to cherish it. Because I remember the day I took my jersey off for the last time in college. It was one of the saddest days of my life I think when I had to do it. I remember when I was a freshman and the seniors were taking their jerseys off. And I thought, ‘oh boy, I’ve got three more years.’ And then before you know it, it’s over.

MIKE: And with that in mind, we’re seeing cuts and we’re seeing programs being slashed  because of high school budgets. That is such an important lesson for people to understand. The money spent on athletics, or band, or arts or whatever it may be. The lessons that you can take out of that are going to last you a lifetime, whether you win a championship, whether you  go to college, whatever the case may be. Being a part of team means something, doesn’t it Gayle?

GAYLE: Oh definitely. And we were lucky enough to go to the state tournament eight times, and we were second three times. And we went home very sad three times there. But it was such a meaningful example of the sportsmanship and the leadership, and meeting other kids from other places. You couldn’t measure it. The benefits are so great and they’re hidden benefits that you think about later on in life. It makes for a better-rounded personality. You bet.

MIKE: We really appreciate the time. It was fascinating looking back at a coaches’ career. Go enjoy those grandkids, alright?

GAYLE: I sure will. Thank you so much for having me.