Diagonal fans honor 1989 team

DIAGONAL — Diagonal basketball fans were taken back in time Friday night to revisit the incredible accomplishments of coach Dennis Tassell’s teams three decades ago.

At halftime of the boys home game against Moravia Friday, retired principal and athletic director Larry Teply led a 30-year reunion introduction of the 1988-89 team that represented the school in the state basketball tournament for the first time in 40 years.

That team entertained its loyal fans by averaging 98 points a game while building a 24-0 record going into state tourney play. When the Maroons blasted Blakesburg 110-57 in a Class A substate game in Centerville, it marked the 11th time that season the Maroons had eclipsed the century mark in scoring, including three of the four postseason tournament games.

Ten members of that 1988-89 team attended Friday’s game, mingling with many of the same fans who followed their road to state 30 years ago. Two key people involved in that year’s success — Tassell and sophomore center Justin Jacobson — are deceased.

“It’s a bad deal that those two are no longer with us,” said Eddie Allee, then a 6-foot-3 senior guard.

“I wish coach was here to see this,” three-time all-stater Terry Anderson said prior to the halftime introduction. “That would be the best thing ever. This (reunion) is awesome.”

Anderson, a versatile 6-4 forward, was the team’s leading scorer with a 24-point average while hauling in 8.4 rebounds a game. He would go on to score 2,506 points, which then ranked No. 2 all-time in Iowa high school boys basketball scoring. He still ranks fourth in that category 30 years later.

Other starters were 6-1 senior point guard Chad Austin, 6-1 senior forward Mark England and 6-0 junior guard Allen Allee. Eddie Allee was the first player off the bench and freshman guard Jason Butler, a primary scorer on the Maroons state tourney team two years later, contributed 4.3 points a game off the bench.

Five players averaged scoring in double figures, with sharpshooter Allen Allee next-highest to Anderson at 20.5 points per game.

Other members of the varsity unit were seniors Clete Boyer, Clarence Olney and Shane Austin; juniors Jonny Schaefer and Jimmy Strange; and sophomores Larry McNutt and Darin Stephens.

Ed Geist and Teply were Tassell’s assistant coaches.

The Diagonal boys lost only one home game between 1987 and 1991, with crowds filling nearly every seat in the gymnasium throughout that period. During that time, the Maroons lost to Murray on a last-second shot in the 1988 district final, made the state tournament in 1989, lost in the substate final to Blakesburg in 1990 and returned to state in 1991 with a 24-1 record.

Gary Bucklin, retired sports director at KSIB Radio in Creston, broadcasted the Maroons’ tournament run in 1989 and was in attendance Friday to honor that squad.

“The thing I remember is the high scoring and the camaraderie they had as a team,” Bucklin said. “They were up and down the floor in transition and they were very good. It was just total domination.”

Scoring depth

Anderson, now living in Des Moines and working for Two Rivers Glass and Door there, said Tassell preached a high-pressure, fast-paced game. Led by the Allee brothers and Austin on the outside, the team made 143 of 347 3-point shots (41.2 percent). That kind of shooting prevented teams from ganging up inside on the 6-4 Anderson and 6-3 Jacobson.

“We had seven guys who could score at any time,” said Anderson, whose son Seth leads the Urbandale team in scoring this year at 20 points a game. “We tried to run teams out of the gym.”

Austin directed that high-octane attack and also scored at a 17.8 pace, capable at both driving the lane or shooting from the perimeter. He said Diagonal’s tiny school just had too many weapons for most opponents.

“When you had the Allee brothers on the wings and Anderson in the low post, what is a team going to do?” said Austin, who lives in Des Moines as a 22-year employee of Nationwide Insurance.

Austin said many fans only saw the side of coach Tassell that shouted at players and officials during games. But, he said there was extreme loyalty to their coach developed through a daily bond.

“Kids on other teams would ask me how I could play for that guy,” Austin said. “The thing that people on the outside didn’t see was how much he cared for his players. He would joke at practice, have nicknames for the players, and he seldom yelled during practice. If he yelled at you during a game, you knew that you needed to listen. He had such a lengthy track record of success here, that you just grew up wanting nothing else but to play for Dennis Tassell.”

Bitter defeat

A 65-50 loss to Colo-NESCO in the state tournament dashed the dream of repeating a state championship earned by Diagonal 50 years earlier in the 1938 tournament. Eddie Allee said a day seldom goes by when he doesn’t think of that game.

“Honestly, my biggest memory is that we didn’t finish what we started,” said Allee, a former high school teacher who returned to Diagonal in 1999 to work in the family’s fertilizer business, Sur-Gro. “Us seniors went undefeated in eighth grade and we vowed then that we were going to go undefeated as seniors and go all the way through. But we didn’t play our game. We played tentatively and we didn’t apply the pressure we normally did.”

A Pomeroy-Palmer team coached by current Harlan coach Mitch Osborn derailed the Maroons at state two years later, 87-77.

Despite garnering no state tournament wins, it was a glorious period of Diagonal Maroons basketball and fans showed their appreciation to many of those players Friday.

“For a town our size, our crowds were always good, and as you went further and further in to the tournament we’d fill a whole side of the gym,” Teply said Friday. “A lot of those people were here tonight who went to those games. It seemed like they enjoyed seeing the guys again.”