Two years after losing in the semifinals of the 1950 boys’ state basketball tournament and finishing in fourth place, the Dinsdale Red Devils of Tama County made a return trip to the Iowa Fieldhouse. Once again, Dinsdale was the smallest high school there (46 students, 22 boys).
In the first round of the 1952 tournament, Dinsdale played giant-killer and Dubuque was the victim. After a slow start (1 point scored in the first four minutes), the pace picked up and Dinsdale pulled off the first-round stunner, 58-50.
In the next round, Dinsdale and Glenwood engaged in a see-saw battle that was tied at 40 with 108 seconds left in the game. Jack Jordan of the Daily Iowan reported:
Between them, the teams shot seven times before the end of the game, and all were good. Four of them went to Dinsdale and they led by two points. As Glenwood forward Stan Davis went in for the shot to tie the game in the last second. he was fouled and the shot went wild. He was awarded two free shots after time had run out. He missed the first and made the second, and Glenwood’s trip to the finals was cut short.
Dinsdale 48, Glenwood 47. Dinsdale was once again on a collision course with Davenport, the largest high school in the state.
Unlike 1950, when the score got out of hand fast, the Red Devils stood their ground against the Blue Devils. More than 15,000 people watched as Dinsdale took a 24-22 lead right before the half against the two-time defending state champions.
The Dinsdale five — Jim Snow, Curt Hoeppner, Paul Ehrig, Dick Fleming, and Russ Greiner — fell behind in the third quarter, but rallied to a one-point deficit with three minutes left. But it was not to be. Davenport pulled away to win 54-47 and would then defeat Keokuk for the state title.
Dinsdale had one more game, the consolation against Roland. The Rockets were 152-9 in five years. Roland had a total of 84 high school students, but one of them was Gary Thompson, “a veteran at the ripe old age of 16” as the Daily Iowan put it. He had made the all-tournament team last year. He would later go on to become Iowa State’s first 1000-point scorer and a familiar face on TV game broadcasts.
The game between the two small schools was “nip-and-tuck,” said the Roland Record. The Rockets led by four at the half but the Red Devils had a big third quarter. The game went into overtime, the first consolation game to do so, and the 15th overall in tournament history. Dinsdale scored two points and “succeeded in stalling out the remainder of the game,” as the Record described it, to win 48-46 and place third in the 1952 tournament.
Sixty years later, the landscape of high school basketball in Iowa has changed greatly. We’ve gone from nearly 1000 separate teams (919 in 1950) in one tournament to 368 in four classes. The tournament moved from the Fieldhouse to the brand-new Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Des Moines in 1955, and then Wells Fargo Arena in 2006. Davenport is now Davenport Central, one of three high schools in the district. Dinsdale became part of the North Tama school district in 1964. The Dinsdale school building has been abandoned for nearly 40 years.
If Dinsdale had beaten Davenport either year and then gone on to win the state title, would the team be as memorable as Milan of Indiana, fictionalized as Hickory in the movie Hoosiers? All the parts are there: David vs. Goliath, a rematch against a former foe that won big the last time, a game on the state’s biggest stage. We can only imagine.