May 18, 2005: A closeup of the girls’ basketball display at the Iowa Hall of Pride shows the top of Clutier’s 1942 state championship trophy. The display case also included memorabilia from the 1968 Union-Whitten title team.
The Iowa Hall of Pride Museum is shutting its doors at the end of the month, the Des Moines Register reports.
The Iowa History Journal, in an undated piece, says:
The $13 million Iowa Hall of Pride, which opened in 2005, is the brainchild of Bernie Saggau, the former longtime executive director of the Iowa High School Athletic Association and it continues to operate as a program of the IHSAA. It attracts thousands of visitors each year from across Iowa and other states. …
Each year, tens of thousands of Iowa students visit the Iowa Hall of Pride on about 400 field trips and many participate in its Pride Outreach and mentoring programs.
The Register article says attendance was in the hundreds each month before the pandemic and has tanked since reopening.
According to a reliable source, the Hall of Pride’s championship rosters for athletics and state extracurriculars were never updated from their initial entries. For example, someone in 2017 could not see a 2007 All-State Speech appearance in the school-by-school roster. A key part of a museum with ongoing components is that those components need to be updated at least occasionally — especially when it’s as simple as supplementary data entry.
Two of the key pieces of memorabilia in the Hall of Pride are Clutier’s 1942 girls’ basketball state championship trophy and white basketball. The basketball had been in the Clutier library and former North Tama AD Tracy Sienknecht helped facilitate the transfer to the Hall of Pride.
If the trophy and ball aren’t going to be on display in Des Moines, I really think they need to be returned to Tama County. They were officially “on loan”, as the Courier article linked above says, so they could be coming home in the near future.