September 13, 2011: The Numa school is now an archery business, a successful repurposing of a school building.
Numa. Clutier. Steamboat Rock. Wiota. In the 1940s, these map dots that don’t have their own schools anymore, along with Numa’s neighbor Seymour, were on the lips of every girls’ basketball fan across the state as the teams to beat. This small part of southern Iowa in particular was a hotbed of “cagers”, with Seymour missing the state tournament only four times between 1936 and 1954, Numa appearing five times in the 1940s, and Centerville on the tail end of nine appearances in 12 years (1931-42).
Those first five schools account for 17 of the 28 semifinalists and six of seven champions in the state tournament — the one, all-classes-all-comers girls’ state basketball tournament — from 1941 to 1947.
In 2010, the Centerville Daily Iowegian reprinted a Gordon Gammack (Des Moines Register) column about a Numa team of the era. Seymour beat Numa for the 1947 state championship, which is covered in detail in the March 2012 newsletter (PDF) from the Wayne County Historical Society. In the modern era, Seymour and Numa would’ve been pitted against each other in an early sectional/district game.
In the 1950s, a new class of contenders — Garnavillo, Goldfield, Garrison, and Gladbrook among them — would take the court under the bright lights of the new Veterans Memorial Auditorium.
(See also this Cedar Rapids Gazette article focusing on Iowa girls’ basketball in 20th century.)