WEST SALEM — As they watched the West Salem High School girls basketball team play against Aquinas on Saturday, Wilbur Johnson and Carol Hanson marveled at what they watched.
It wasn’t foreign. Both still watch the game today, but as they sat in the stands and awaited recognition for their roles in 50 years of girls basketball at the school, what they watched didn’t resemble what they coached when with the Panthers.
Johnson was West Salem’s first coach in 1976, and Hanson followed just a few years later.
“The kind of game we played doesn’t even look like basketball compared to this,” Johnson said with a chuckle at halftime. “The run and gun and shoot. They’ve already made 20 more trips (up and down the floor) than we made in a whole ball game.
“We played slow and deliberate. Of course, we didn’t have the skills they have now.”
Hanson still watches her nieces and nephews play in Whitehall and said that serves as a reminder of how far the game has come since the 18 seasons she coached it into the mid-1990s.
“We played so differently,” said Hanson, who also coached volleyball for 33 seasons and was junior varsity coach under Johnson before taking over the basketball program. “We had a lot of plays and played many defenses in one game.”
Johnson’s experience to that point, of course, was boys basketball. He returned to that after handing the girls team over to Hanson, but only after he took it to the WIAA state tournament twice.
The Panthers represented Class C at the tournament in both 1977 and 1978. They lost to Marshall in the semifinals the first time and to Oakfield in the semifinals the second.
Both teams in the court Saturday have enjoyed monstrous recent success, but their paths were carved out by people like Johnson and Hanson — both of whom had to fight for their players.
“There were a lot of things we had to do behind the scenes,” Hanson said, “and I tried not to be a jerk about it, but if things weren’t right, you had to fight for your kids.”
Something as simple as practice space was one of those things.
Hanson also had to fight for herself just trying to be an athlete in high school. She may not have understood basketball at a very high level, but she had a natural talent that she enjoyed taking advantage of.
“When I was in middle school, I used to beat all the boys in basketball,” she said. “But a female teacher came up to me and said basketball is for boys. Girls are cheerleaders.
“That’s what I came from, and now seeing this is great.”
Johnson said he had 25 players during his first season, and his dedication to them was coaching both the junior varsity and varsity games.
And coaching at that point in the sport was much more like classroom teaching.
“You have to start someplace,” Johnson said. “I’d take them to the blackboard, and we had a lot of our practices in the classroom.
“It was just explaining the game.”
The Panthers have now made five state appearances after qualifying twice with current coach Mike Malott and once with former coach Matt Quick. Those four — Malott in two stints — are the only coaches in program history.
Hanson joked that she is the only one not to take the Panthers to the state tournament, but she certainly had a hand in the team qualifying in 1997 — her first year away.
