‘Energy and Passion’
On a chilly night, Feb. 27, 2017, 65 miles from Glenwood, on the hardwood of Harlan Community High School, a motto was born from defeat.
The words, two simple words really, that rose from the frustration of the Rams’ 69-68 loss to Atlantic in the substate finals – their second straight such heartbreaking loss in as many years – would guide the team all off-season and into what would become a historic 2017-2018 season.
“Unfinished Business.”
The Rams’ professional approach to completing what they started with a state bid three years earlier culminated in a historic stretch at the Class 3A state championship game with an upset victory over Oskaloosa to win the school’s first-ever state basketball title.
But to understand how far this team has come since that night last March in Harlan, one has to go back much further.
This finished business actually began 12 years earlier with the hiring of a coach who had not only never been a varsity head coach before but one who had never coached a single game in the state of Iowa.
* * *
Curt Schulte was content.
As a P.E. teacher in the Millard Public Schools, when not coordinating dodge ball games and leading health classes at Kiewit Middle School, Schulte was an assistant coach for successful varsity basketball and football programs at Millard North.
But coaching tugged hard at the 34-year old.
Schulte wanted to be a head coach.
Fate intervened in the spring of 2006.
An old friend of his reached out about a head coaching job and he listened.
The person on the other end of the phone was Scott Arkfeld, a former teammate at Harlan and a friend of Schulte for over 25 years. Once upon a time the two – with Arkfeld as the junior quarterback and Schulte, the senior all-conference wide receiver – formed a potent offensive battery for the Cyclones on two state playoff football teams.
Arkfeld had recently accepted the athletic director position at Glenwood. There was an opening for head boys basketball coach. His first thought was of his old friend in Millard.
“When I knew there was a spot open in basketball, that’s who I wanted right away,” said Arkfeld, who now works in private business.
With Arkfeld hired but not yet assuming duties in Glenwood, Bill Eich, who was then the district’s director of personnel and instruction, handled Schulte’s interview.
“Scott had said he thought he was our guy and to take a good look at him,” Eich recalled. “When someone says that who is going to be on your administrative team, you look at it strongly.”
Eich was “blown away” by the young coach.
“Curt was a go-getter,” he said. “He was so enthusiastic. I walked in and he was already walking around the old high school and talking about old memories he had playing in that gym for Harlan.”
Eich liked Schulte’s experience as an assistant and that he had fresh ideas about the youth basketball program.
“He knew we were coming off a difficult season but he had a strong belief, and he emphasized this, that if you hire me, I can get this turned around,” Eich said. “He had this confidence and enthusiasm for the job and what it took to do that.”
Of the handful of names Eich interviewed for the job, Schulte’s name was the only one he put forward to then Glenwood Superintendent Stan Sibley for an offer.
Schulte, however, wasn’t on board quite yet.
The Glenwood basketball job wasn’t considered a prime destination job.
He’d be taking over a program that had little to no history of winning and even less tradition. Between the 1960-61 and 2003-2004 seasons, the Rams had just two winning seasons. The school’s lone state qualifying team to that point had come during the Truman administration.
In 2006, Glenwood was searching for its fourth head coach in four years after a disastrous 1-20 season.
Arkfeld knew he’d have to sell his old friend on the job. He’d looked at the Glenwood basketball program, its history and inconsistency on the bench and felt Schulte was the right man for the job. But turning around a moribund program can be a daunting task. Even more so for a first-year head coach.
“Going from assistant coach to a head coach is a whole different animal,” Arkfeld said. “And we talked about that a little bit but he, I thought, was ready after talking to him. Being at a big (Nebraska) Class A school, working under some of the good coaches he had, it felt like we both thought he could do the job.”
It just took some convincing.
Schulte hadn’t coached in the Hawkeye 10 but he’d seen Glenwood while a competitor at Harlan. He’d seen the Rams’ success in wrestling and track. but he admitted he knew very little about the former conference rivals.
The Ram basketball program hardly moved the needle for him.
Schulte interviewed with a committee of administrators. He was flattered by the offer and the opportunity, but he was on the fence about accepting.
He loved his job in Millard. As an assistant coach he’d been a part of two Mustang football state championships and the basketball team was returning a strong core from a state-qualifying team.
“I was really enjoying what I was doing and my position at the time,” Schulte said. “I really enjoyed working with Coach (Chip) Bahe. We had a great relationship and we both had the same philosophy. I really enjoyed everything about my job at the time.”
So Schulte called the one person who’s opinion mattered the most then and still does to this day: his father Harold.
“I think I’m going to take the Glenwood job,” Schulte related to his father more than a decade ago.
Harold Schulte paused on the other end of the line. The silence deafening. Finally he responded, “Are you sure, son?’’
Schulte was.
He wanted to get back into the conference he grew up playing in. He wanted to be closer to his family.
He wanted to be a head coach.
“At first, I did have some reluctance but I knew there was a lot of potential here,” Schulte said. “There was good talent in Glenwood. My goal would be to get everyone on the same page. I felt like if we could do that, I really thought we could turn the page and go a different, a winning, and positive direction with the program.”
* * *
Winning basketball programs, much like Rome, aren’t built in a day.
They take time. There’s growing pains, ugly losses, players buy in or they don’t and parents offer support or they don’t - every young program and new coach goes through these cycles.
And sure, Glenwood basketball had seen it’s fair share in it’s century of roundball.
But Schulte had a plan.
And a firm belief in process. He’d put his program-building emphasis on preparation and hard work over consideration of outcomes or results. Wins and losses are one thing but progress would be judged by effort, teamwork and development.
While Schulte’s first team would become nearly instantly competitive, going 10-12 during the 2006-2007 season – an amazing nine-game improvement over the previous year’s win total – the coach worked tirelessly behind the scenes on a long-term end game: building his program through Ram youth basketball.
Eich, who has served on the youth basketball board for several years, saw that same enthusiasm Schulte exuded in his interviews in how he tackled the youth program.
“He became a part of the program,” Eich said of Schulte.
Schulte took an active role on the board, changed how tournaments were run, built up travel teams and personally recruited coaches. He’d open the door to the gym Saturday mornings, greet people as they came in and locked up in the evening. He made the program about the kids, the players and the game – not about him.
“He never wanted to lose a kid,” Eich said. “That was his real strength in the youth program. He wanted every kid to stay on and did not want to lose a kid who wasn’t having fun. He wanted to make it so enjoyable they kept coming back every year.”
Schulte had plenty of experience with youth basketball. He’d come up in the Harlan program and worked closely with Millard’s Junior Mustang program. He’d spent much of his off hours at his previous post conducting camps and coordinating youth leagues, teaching fundamentals and building young basketball players.
It was something Arkfeld had always admired about his old teammate and then as a colleague. Schulte tackled coaching the same way he did as a player: with a tenacious drive and energy.
Schulte had that rare gift of being able to reach players, equally adept at explaining the nuances of motion offense to a senior point guard as proper elbow placement on a jump shot to third grader. He was a tireless worker from the second his shoes hit the hardwood in Glenwood.
“To me, as an A.D., you want that,” Arkfeld said. “He had that energy and passion and you knew he was going to get kids to come out and play. That was my biggest thing: Are you going to be able to motivate these kids? Because the tradition wasn’t there. Bringing in a veteran coach with a lot of experience coaching in Iowa, I don’t know if that would have been the right call. I wanted someone to come in with the passion and energy and desire to be a head coach. He had that.”
After his first season, the Rams improved to 12-10 in year two. It was the school’s first winning season since 2003-2004 and just third winning season since 1960.
While the record dipped to 9-13 the following year, Schulte’s team won double-digit games each of the next four seasons, a streak that had happened only once before in school history.
But Schulte wasn’t happy. He feared the program had leveled off. There was talk they’d topped out.
The program had inched forward to be sure, progress was there, Schulte said, but hadn’t yet turned the corner. His team’s were competitive night in and night out but they lost more big games than they won in those years.
“There’s always times where you re-evaluate what you’re doing and there’s been times where I’d say ‘maybe we need to do this..’ or ‘next year lets try this.’ Or we need to do this or that or whatever.
“But I really believed, from Day 1, in the process. I felt confident in the direction we were going and I just knew it was a matter of time before we’d get it to where we wanted to get it.”
The 2013-2014 Rams were an unknown commodity to start the season but by the end of the year, they’d won the school’s first district title in half a century and finished one game short of a state tournament berth with a substate loss to Harlan.
For Schulte, and the patient Ram fans, even the loss felt like a win for a program that was starving for a winner and about to turn the corner.
“We gradually built the program,” Schulte said. “It was a slow process. We were always competitive and in that upper half of the conference but it was about then, when we reached that substate final, where I really thought we were there. We played a big game. We won our first district title. We got to our first substate final. I really felt the momentum was coming our way.”
The very next season, the Rams found themselves back in the substate finals where they battled back to avenge two regular season losses to Denison with a 54-49 victory to earn a bid to the state tournament for the first time since 1952.
The Rams would fall in their state tournament opener, 65-40 to Williamsburg, but the state bid would kick off a Ram renaissance.
Beginning with that season, Glenwood would go 74-26 over the four year stretch, win four district titles, two conference titles, grab two state tournament berths and culminate it all with its biggest win yet.
A state title.
* * *
Dozens of newspapers and media outlets around the state of Iowa offered predictions for the state basketball tournament this year.
Glenwood, the No. 4 seeded Rams from western Iowa with little basketball tradition, wasn’t among any of the picks to win it all.
Not a one.
The overlooked status suited Schulte and his team just fine.
“Our kids like being the underdogs,” he said. “It got them fired up. We felt like we weren’t always respected and we had something to prove when we got down there. We weren’t just happy to be there. We wanted to get to state and make some noise and prove we CAN play some basketball in this side of the state too.”
That shoulder chip was certainly a driving force this season as the Rams went 25-2 in their state championship season.
But it was perhaps born from disappointment. The kind of disappointment that comes from two straight seasons ending in crushing substate losses – once in overtime and the other, by one point to Atlantic last season – to finishing frustratingly one game short of the state tournament. All coming after the Rams appeared poised to continue the basketball ascent they started at state three years earlier.
“The goal every year was: get as far as you can go (in the post-season),” Schulte said. “And we won a lot of big games along the way but we also lost some heartbreakers along the way.”
None, perhaps, more heartbreaking than last year’s substate loss to Atlantic.
The 1-point loss was the tipping point for Schulte’s bunch.
They would declare that very night they would not suffer a similar fate next season.
Schulte admits he borrowed the “unfinished business” mantra from the Nebraska football team in the mid-1990s. That team rode a disappointing Orange Bowl loss into back-to-back national championships in 1994 and 1995.
“We felt we were really close those two years from making it to state three years in a row,” Schulte said. “And we got nipped. We came in after that Atlantic game and said this is ‘unfinished business’ and we’re going to work hard, put a lot of time in in the gym and the weight room and put in more work than any other opponent in the state. We were determined to not let that happen again.”
Glenwood cruised through the regular season this year, losing just once to a team from Iowa, and into the state tournament.
Their route to the title game was never easy, however. Every opponent was better seeded and heavily favored.
In the quarterfinals, No. __ seeded Norwalk got up 20 in the first half before Glenwood pulled off an improbably rally for the ages in a 67-58 win. In the semis, two-time defending champion Cedar Rapids Xavier waited and then watched as the Rams made every little play imaginable to pull the upset in a 69-63 victory.
Oskaloosa was the biggest – literally – challenge the Rams faced in their state run. The Indians boasted a front line that went 6-foot-5, 6-foot-9 and 6-foot-11.
Schulte and his never-ones-to-be-intimidated team, as an antidote for his team’s lack of size, deployed a “pace and space” game plan that had the Rams spreading the floor on offense and over-powering the Indian wings to keep the ball out of the middle of the floor.
The plan worked perfectly and the rest, they say, is history.
“A state championship, it’s always a goal,” Schulte said. “When you coach, it’s always in the back of your mind. It’s something you’re working towards. The state championship is always kind of out there. You don’t know if it’s ever going to come or not, but you’re trying to put everything in place to make it happen.”
Arkfeld, the former A.D., deflected credit on playing a part in the state title but did say he does feel a sense of pride in knowing he played a small part in getting his former teammate to take the Glenwood job. Mostly, though, he’s happy for his friend.
“I felt good for him because I know how much time he put into it,” he said. “As a former coach, win or lose, at the end of the season it is time consuming, wears on your body, and is difficult for your family. In the end I was very pleased to reach out to him and tell him congratulations on winning a state championship.”
It’s not lost on many observers and Ram fans how Glenwood won its first ever state basketball title. They did it exactly the way Schulte and his coaching staff envisioned it as they built this program up from near scratch more than a decade earlier: with good solid, fundamental basketball.
At glance at the state tournament stats tells the tale of a well-balanced, well-coached TEAM: they made 46-of-52 free throws and held a plus-11 rebounding edge. They limited all three opponents below their scoring averages and they had five different players score in double figures at least once.
Schulte still says “state champions” still sticks in his throat when he says it, calling the feeling “surreal.” It’s hard for the coach to keep up with the congratulations he’s gotten from the community he now calls home.
“There’s not a day that passes that I regret my decision,” he said. “I’m extremely happy. I bought into the community. My family has moved here. My kids go to school here. There are a lot of great people here. It’s a great school district. It’s a school district and community that reminds me of where I grew up. I wanted my kids to be a part of that. As a family we’re very excited to be here in Glenwood.”
Twelve years ago Curt Schulte came to Glenwood a first year head coach with a dream of building a winner. He didn’t start by talking about state titles or even wins and losses. He would win by stressing participation, buying in and being on the same page. He unified that process by stressing hard work and surrounding the program with great coaches, administrators and fans dedicated to that pursuit.
And the state title?
Consider it a nice bonus for a program very few gave much of a chance.
“If they didn’t know where Glenwood was on a map before the state tournament,” Schulte said, “they sure do now.”
And its clear who helped put them there.