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Elko Edition Rea Reaching ch Elkhart, Kosciusko, Noble And LaGrange Counties Vol. 34, No. 12
www.seniorlifenewspapers.com
Four gyms have hosted
%\ 7,0 $6+/(< 6WDII :ULWHU Loren Shaum referred to it as a “cracker box” gym. The “cracker box” was the original gym used by Concord High School for basketball games. Concord basketball history dates back to the 1927-28 school year, according to Earl Mishler’s website, etpearl.homestead.com, considered one of the best resources for high school basketball history in northern Indiana. That first Concord team had six freshmen on the roster and played a schedule against almost entirely eighth grade teams. A separate high school had not yet been built and high school students likely still attended the old one-room schoolhouse on South Main Street in Dunlap. Concord first participated in the state tournament in basketball during the 1928-29 season, the first year the school was a member of the IHSAA. Concord lost to Nappanee 71-4 in its first sectional game ever. Home basketball games were played in what became known as the Central building, a school located on the corner of Mishawaka Road and US 33 in Dunlap. It opened in 1926 and had a small gym in the basement. Shaum, a 1960 graduate of Concord who played three full seasons of varsity basketball and in the sectional tourney as a freshman, played in the original gym when he was in elementary school. He noted one end of the gym
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had a padded wall under the basket and “the floor had dead spots in it and the basketball didn’t come back up to you.” The boiler room was behind the gym and there was barely enough room to place a bench for the teams to sit on between the floor and the spectator seating. “The dressing room was a bathroom,” he recalled. Concord continued to play in that gym until the end of the 1937-38 season. A newspaper account of the first game played in the next gym in 1956 indicated it had been 18 years since Concord had played a home game on school property, so that would put the year at 1938 when games were no longer played in the original gym. A check of newspaper archives shows the first few “home” games Concord played in the 193839 season were at Bristol and Jimtown. At some point Concord started playing home games at Nappanee. It is also not clear why Concord stopped playing in the cracker box gym. “It was a rural community and mostly farmland and there was probably no funding for a new gym,” Shaum said, adding the gym was really unfit for playing high school basketball in. In 1928, for example, the roof had collapsed in the gym. Les McCuen took over as coach for the 1938-39 season and it is possible he may have decided playing in the gym was no longer safe. In August 1975 the gym and buildContinued on page 3
Concord High School hoops
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