Mark Story: Wooden started coaching in Kentucky, and lost

The Dayton High School yearbook was unsparing in its assessment of the work of the school's first-year basketball coach.

When you play 17 times and lose 11 of them, it's not going to fill a school's fans with glee.

"A discouraging season," the annual said of the 1932-33 Greendevils. "Dayton will attempt to make a better showing next year."

What the kids putting out the 1933 yearbook for the school in Campbell County could never have dreamed is that the hoops season they were chronicling would become one of basketball's great historical anomalies.

The young Dayton coach was John Wooden — he of the 10 NCAA championships won for UCLA. In an epic basketball coaching career, he would never again field a losing team.

Many of the tributes to Wooden since his death June 4 make mention of the coach's subpar start in Kentucky high school basketball.

In 1999, I interviewed the iconic basketball figure over the phone for a story on coaching motivational techniques. It was the only time I ever spoke to Wooden.

When I identified myself as a Kentucky sportswriter, Wooden said, "You know, I coached there. My oldest daughter was born in Kentucky."

From that moment, I wondered what Wooden had been like in his days coaching in the commonwealth.

In 2003, I had a chance to find out.

On a crisp, late autumn day, I ventured north to the Ohio River hamlet of Dayton to talk with 88-year-old Howard Fahrubel.

At that time, Fahrubel — who would die only months after we talked — was one of the last living players who had played high school basketball for John Wooden in Kentucky.

From the start, Wooden was the antithesis of the preening, screaming coach. "He never did raise hell with us that I can remember," said Fahrubel.

A football player at heart, Fahrubel was not on Wooden's first losing hoops team. But the next year, he said he was enticed to come out for hoops.

When he joined the basketball team, Fahurbel says he saw no evidence that the Dayton players had lost confidence in Wooden after the rocky first season. That was partly because the young coach was easily the best basketball player in town.

In college, Wooden had been one of the nation's premier hoops performers at Purdue.

"He was the best I ever saw. Best ball-handler I ever did see," Fahrubel said.

The 20-something coach and his young wife, Nell, would occasionally invite the Dayton players to their house, a two-story brick at the corner of 10th and Terraces, for meals, Fahrubel remembered.

After Wooden became a national sports figure, Dayton, a town of almost 6,000, sought to maintain its ties to the coach.

"He came back a couple of times," Stan Steidel, the former longtime Dayton High basketball coach, said Monday. "He spoke at a banquet for us. He came back and reunited with the teams he coached a couple of times."

Steidel is now best known in Kentucky as the father of the small-school state basketball tournament, the All 'A' Classic. But he coached at Dayton High for 30-plus years.

When he had a good basketball season, "I always felt good because I'd won at the school where John Wooden had his only losing season," Steidel said.

Conversely, when the coach had a bad team at Dayton, "I'd say, 'What do you expect, even John Wooden had a losing season here,'" Steidel said with a laugh.

Today, the little school of some 277 (grades 9-12) has on display a basketball Wooden autographed for it. Dayton also has a rectangular plaque honoring the coach in its gymnasium.

In recognition of John R. Wooden and his contributions to the game of basketball. Dayton High School basketball coach 1932-34.

Contemporary students "do, I think, know who Coach Wooden was," Dayton Principal Rick Wolf said Monday. "Obviously, as time passes, that's not as strong as it was. But I think the kids who play basketball, they very much know who John Wooden was and that he coached at our school."

The coach never forgot his time in Kentucky.

Long after he had become one of America's coaching giants, Wooden often spoke of his first year at Dayton High — when he also coached football, baseball and track — as the most important of his professional life.

"I learned what not to do," he said.

In Wooden's second and final year as Dayton Greendevils basketball coach, his team indeed "made a better showing."

It went 15-3.

The rest, as they say, is history.

This story was originally published June 8, 2010 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Mark Story: Wooden started coaching in Kentucky, and lost."