Minster Gymnasium was the place to be

As the Minster Wildcats prepare to host the New Bremen Cardinals in one of our area's historic basketball rivalries, the gymnasium inside Minster Middle School will be an understandably busy place tomorrow evening.

Diagonally across the parking lot however, the middle school gym's "little brother" will rest dark and vacant just as it has on Friday and Saturday nights during basketball season for more than a decade.

This silence wasn't the case though 50 years ago, nearly to the day, when the Cardinals flew into town. It was January 8, 1965, and the new Minster High School had just officially opened its doors when it welcomed kids back from Christmas break and that evening it was set to host its first athletic event, as 1,300 fans filed through the doors.

"It was definitely a new experience for us going from the gym next to the church to the new facility – a lot of the schools that we played against had really small gyms and now we finally had the opportunity to play in our own, much bigger gym against our biggest rival," recalled former Wildcat point guard Gary Heitkamp. "I never really cared for playing in tiny gyms anyhow. The benches and the fans were so close to the floor and as a guard, I needed room to move! You were so limited on those small floors, so playing in the new gym was like the difference of landing an airplane in Montezuma compared to putting one down at O'Hare in Chicago!"

The first time the Wildcats and Cardinals tangled that season, just a mere week prior, Minster prevailed 85-84 in an overtime thriller. Neither team played more than their five starters for the entire game as nine of the ten on the floor hit double-digits in the historic battle.

Things quickly picked up where they had left off in the previous meeting as the unbeaten Wildcats pushed out to an early 21-18 command. The rivals played even throughout the second quarter, scoring 20 points apiece, as the home team clung to a slim 41-38 advantage at the halftime break.

"We were one of those teams that if the game was close or we were losing at halftime, we usually turned things in our favor quickly in the second half," remarked former Wildcat Harry Riethman. "We were down by 18 points to Delphos St. John's in the middle of the third quarter in tournament that season and came back to win – nothing really rattled us. We were a well-conditioned team that ran a full-court press and normally managed to wear our opponents out."   

Whatever it was that Wildcat head coach Virgil Winglewich shouted to his boys in the locker room at intermission seemed to have immediate repercussions as the Orange and Black came out on fire and built their cushion to 69-57 by the time the contest marched into the final quarter. The two squads continued to duke it out nearly bucket for bucket in the final minutes, but the Cardinals desperately needed more than that. When the final horn screamed at the end of the game, the Orange and Black outscored their rivals by two more points in the stanza and secured the convincing 89-75 victory in Auglaize County League play.

"That game was a fantastic atmosphere against a top-notch program from New Bremen," Riethman explained. "It was absolutely packed inside the gym. I can remember taking the ball out of bounds from underneath the basket and the official had to move people to the side to make room. The bleachers were full and fans were lined up all along every wall and in the corners - it was really amazing."

Fred Meyer and Ron Thieman led five double-digit scorers for Minster with 25 points apiece, while Riethman chalked up 18 and Jan Bachman and Heitkamp notched 12 and ten respectively in the triumph. New Bremen's Dean Harlamert led everyone in the tilt with 29 points while Randy McCune and Larry Busse added 14 and 13 counters apiece.

"We had a lot of great rivalries back then with towns who were close by like New Knoxville, Marion Local, and Fort Loramie, but none were bigger for us than New Bremen," Heitkamp pointed out. "We knew all of their guys like Busse and McCune, and that helped us to really want to go out and kick their butts even more."

From that night forward, for nearly 40 years, the gym nestled inside Minster High School hosted 1,000s of games, physical education classes and concerts, but Father Time eventually had the final say as the facility gave way to the newer, more spacious, technology-friendly venue a couple hundred steps to its north west.   

Although the gym wasn't completely forgotten, the events and games it hosts today will never surpass the special night which kicked things off on that cold January evening in 1965 when it was the most popular place in town.