'No. No. No Way'

60 years ago this week, Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in a game. We asked coaches: Could an area player ever do it?

Photo from Associated Press

The late Wilt Chamberlain set a ton of records before he retired from the NBA. Many still stand. Perhaps no record is more amazing than Chamberlain's 100 points in a single game.

On March 2, 1962, 25-year-old Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points for the Philadelphia Warriors in an NBA game against the New York Knicks in Hershey, Pa.

Chamberlain never reached that mark again. Neither has anyone else in the NBA.

Photo from Associated Press

Wilt Chamberlain scores his 100th point against the New York Knicks in Hershey, Pennyslvania, in 1962.

But Chamberlain has company at other levels of basketball: Division III Grinnell College's Jack Taylor has done it twice in the early 2010s, scoring 138 against Faith Baptist Bible College to break Bevo Francis' 1954 NCAA record and adding a 109-point game a year later, and at the Ohio high school level, Dick Bogenrife beat Chamberlain by nine years, scoring 120 for Sedalia Midway in a 1953 game.

In the Grand Lake area, no one has come close to 100 points in a single game in the last 100 years.

Could they?

File Photo/The Daily Standard

Marion Local boys coach Kurt Goettemoeller.

"No. No. No way," Marion Local coach Kurt Goettemoeller said. "I think the way the game's being played now, it's more of a defensive game.

"For something like that to happen, you'd have to have a kid that was, obviously, very good, and the team they were playing wouldn't be very good, and they would probably be taken out of the game long before they would get to that plateau."

The official Mercer County record belongs to Bob Howell of the former Mendon-Union High School. He scored 59 points in a game in the 1960s.

No one in the region has even come that close to 100 since.

File Photo/The Daily Standard

Minster boys coach Michael McClurg.

"I think the physicality defensively around here would make it really difficult for someone to do that," Minster coach Michael McClurg said. "We haven't seen too many 7-footers, but if you had a 7-footer, I could see it possibly. But even then, the possessions - if you look at total shots for a team - you might get to 50 shots in a game. I would say, somebody gets to 50, that would be amazing."

Chamberlain was 7 feet one inch tall.

By McClurg's stats, Minster averaged 39 shots and 13 turnovers per game this season for around 52 possessions a game, which he considered fairly typical. For a player to even hit 50 points, he would have to score on a minimum of 17 possessions, and that would require 100% shooting from the field.

To have a reasonable shot at 50 points in a game, then, a player would have to take up an enormous percentage of his team's looks. For a shot at 100, he would have to get almost all of them.

File Photo/The Daily Standard

St. Henry boys coach Eric Rosenbeck.

St. Henry coach Eric Rosenbeck was willing to entertain the possibility of a 100-point game, as the longest of long shots.

"It's one-in-a-million, but, yes, I think it could happen," he said. "The first thing that I think would have to happen is the opposing team, their style, they'd have to be somebody who's full-court, run-and-gun, get as many shots up as possible, to hypothetically give the person an opportunity to do such a thing."

Chamberlain played in an era with no 3-point line, but he was on the court for all 48 minutes - a full 16 minutes more than regulation in a high school game. He scored 25 points in the final eight minutes, breaking the record in the final 46 seconds of the game as kids in the crowd raced onto the court. A career 51% free throw shooter, he hit 26-of-28 on his record-breaking night.

Goettemoeller and McClurg also attributed some of his scoring to playing in a less physical era.

Particularly with Midwest Athletic Conference teams priding themselves on defense, breaking through for a full 100 points would be tough.

"The game was just called so much differently back then," Goettemoeller said. "There wasn't a lot of contact in basketball like there is today. There's a lot of contact in today's game, and that brings scoring down."

But the advent of 3-point shooting does open up the possibility for a shooter to quickly pile up points. Rosenbeck thought the most likely candidate would be someone who could both hit outside shots and get to the rim, in the mold of recent Shawnee grad and 2020 Division II Player of the Year George Mangas.

"A wing/forward that can really shoot and get to the rim, somebody that has the ability to hit 16, 18 threes while also going to the foul line 28 times and making 25 of 28 free throws," Rosenbeck said. "Someone that can really shoot the ball and when they get pressed, get to the rim and draw fouls. There'd have to be a lot of foul shots to stop the clock, in a 32-minute game, and a running clock in there would be a huge factor."

Under Ohio High School Athletic Association rules, the running clock starts when one team has a 35-point lead in the second half, and if the other team gets within 35 points, the clock reverts to normal operation.

The last serious threat to Howell's Mercer County mark was St. Henry's Rick Stahl, who put up 57 on Feb. 16, 1974, under coach Fran Guilbault. With a healthy lead heading into the fourth and Stahl five points short of the school record, coach Guilbault asked him to go out into the hall for a drink and let his team talk him into keeping Stahl in for a shot at the record, according to Guilbault's recollections in a 2014 story by Robb Hemmelgarn in the Daily Standard.

"The reserves then kept setting him up for good shots," Guilbault said in that 2014 interview, "and by that time Rick could have drop-kicked it from half-court and it would have went in."

Stahl shot 25-of-39 from the field and the Redskins beat Bradford 109-62 - still a far cry from the 169-147 final score in Chamberlain's masterpiece. Marion, traditionally a defensive program, has only reached 100 points as a team once.

"This is my sixth year, and I think I've only been in one game where I've seen 80 points scored by a team," McClurg said. "The games we play around here - and I know there's a faster brand of basketball in spots of Ohio - but around here, I don't see it ever happening."

McClurg ran into a similar predicament to Guilbault's four years ago, with Isaac Schmiesing at 34 points midway through the fourth. McClurg didn't realize Schmiesing was only seven points from the school record and felt that sportsmanship demanded he send in the subs.

Now, he isn't sure he'd make the same choice.

"I can't tell you exactly what I would do. I kind of regret that, in some ways," McClurg said. "You do have that sportsmanship side, but then it's important to that kid to maybe get that record. The other coach may just have to understand what you're trying to do."

While Howell holds the official county record, there's some evidence that a Fort Recovery player made a run at the century mark four decades earlier. A Daily Standard item from Jan. 20, 1922 describes a "basket-shootin' youngster" named Jones - likely 1922 grad Hubert Jones - scoring 88 points for Fort Recovery High School in a 100-10 win over a team identified as "St. Henry Academy."

Jones isn't included in the OHSAA records, which were compiled from information sent in by the schools. Fort Recovery's records don't include him, and so Tom Bryan is the Indians' official record-holder with 55 points in a game on Dec. 27, 1966.

As for Jones' big night, all but lost to history, it stands as a performance which this area will likely never see again.

Most points in a game, boys, by school:

*Mendon-Union was consolidated into Parkway after 1991-92.

Most points in a game, girls, by school

*State championship game.