The best thing about being a state champion?
It wasn’t etching your name in the history books. Or the fanfare — as magical as it was.
“It was the camaraderie,” noted Emily Middleton. “Just coming back and seeing everybody, it was like we’d never left. It sure never felt like it was 20 years.”
The 2006 Fillies basketball squad was formally enshrined Friday into the Don Bain Hall of Fame, in front of a packed house of supporters, including several former classmates, current and former teachers and the guest of honor, Don Bain, who at age 94 is scaling back his social calendar.
“There were a few tears with that one,” Middleton said with a smile.
IOLA’S 2005-06 basketball season — like so many others in rural America — took root years earlier, when many of those same players were elementary school classmates.
“I think it was the second or third grade,” recalled Tyner Apt-Hill. “There were so many of us.”
“I think we started realizing by the time we were in middle school that we could beat a lot of people,” agreed teammate Heather Rourk.
The core seven — Apt-Hill, Rourk, Middleton, Emily (Larson) Sigg, Marissa Scott, Sabrina (Strickler) Callahan and Kayleigh (Strickler) Vaughn — were joined as freshmen by newcomer Rosalyn (Lewallen) Lillis.
And like other talented classes, they brought home plenty of wins. They were freshmen reserves in Iola’s 2003 squad that took fourth in the state. They shined as sophomores, but couldn’t get past substate, before hitting their stride as juniors in 2004-05.
There, they went 20-3, and advanced to the state tournament — “and got obliterated in our first game,” Apt-Hill recalled.
But with the entire starting lineup, plus some, set to return as seniors, hopes were high.
Only to be dashed before the season began.
Head coach Bryan Wood, the only head coach they’d known as high-schoolers, resigned just days before school started that fall, moving out of state to tend to an ailing relative.
“It was devastating,” Rourk said. “We’d come this far, and we didn’t know what was going on.”
But fate has a way of intervening.
Her name was Becky Carlson.
A native of rural Elsmore, Carlson was a standout player, first at Marmaton Valley High School followed by Allen County Community College. When she transferred to Tabor College, Carlson excelled at volleyball, basketball and track and field.
After her playing days ended, Carlson took to coaching like a duck to water.
She had already embarked on a Hall of Fame-worthy career at Hillsboro High School, coaching her teams to a pair of state basketball titles and a state championship in volleyball.
