The First South Dakota Boys Basketball Tournament, 1912

Many years ago, or so the story goes, South Dakota farm boys whiled away idle winter hours by throwing snowballs through barn doors.  Then in 1891, in Springfield, Massachusetts, James Naismith nailed two peach baskets to opposite walls.  The game that resulted spread across America.  It was called basket ball (two words) at first, and the game improved when they changed baskets to nets so that a ball would drop through and not have to be retrieved each time a field goal was scored.  Early practitioners of the sport in South Dakota nailed up backboards (which came into vogue in 1895) wherever they could.  Trees, light poles, haymow rafters, granary walls, the outer shells of silos. There were no backboards nailed to garages back then, because automobiles weren’t available in numbers for another twenty years.  Courts were jerry-built into school auditoriums.

During the first decade of the twentieth century school teams were formed sporadically from the Black Hills to the Minnesota border.  Not satisfied just to compete against each other from Thanksgiving to the March thaw, some of the more successful boys teams organized tournaments of varying types in different geographical regions.  Invariably, speculation would commence as to how a team from the southeast might fare against another from the northwest.

In 1912, taking note of the stimulating conversations, Charles Hochstetter of Huron College arranged a “state” tournament.  Founder Hochstetter taught history and Latin at Huron College, in addition to his role as athletics director.  The eight initial contestants represented high schools from, Arlington, Centerville, Lake Preston, Madison, Miller, Pierre, Redfield, and Salem. 1912 STATE TOURNAMENT PARTICIPANTS, #2

It was open to the first eight schools’ coaches who desired to enter.  In Huron’s Daum’s Auditorium, Redfield, after trailing 21-11 at the half, won the March 16 title game by a score of 33-25 over Lake Preston. The outcome gave South Dakotans their first opportunity to make the word “comeback” a part of the sports dialogue.