Dave Strain and the 1982 Cobblers (l to r): Bill Anderson, Kelly Maguire, Greg Duney, T. Pederson, Coach Strain, Marty Branch, Jim Hicks, Arlyn Thompson, and Andy Sanders.
Rich Gerry goes upfor the reboundagainst a tough Cheyenne Central team.
The 1969 Rapid City Cobblers (l to r) Rich Gerry, Bob Riss, Mark Benner, Randy Stolpe, John Mickelson, Jack Tennyson, John Dutton, Mark Ecklund, and Steve Withorne.
A Quarter Century of Basketball Excellence
Dave Strain and the Cobbler Legacy
By Jimmy Davies RAPID CITY – Every town in South Dakota has a face they want people to see. But beneath that face there is a soul; a history of struggle and accomplishment, of misunderstood truths and comforting lies, a history of everyday people caught up in pursuits and sacrifices which only hindsight renders outstanding and ignoble. Some would say Rapid City has two souls, that it is really two communities, two sets of people. Even nature understood this, and thrust up a sting of rocky, pine-mantled hilltops to divide the town, leaving only a narrow gap to connect the halves, a narrow gap carved by a life-giving stream of cold, sparkling water called Rapid Creek. Centuries back the Lakota people made the Black Hills the sacred center of their world. They had to live on the prairie because that was where the herds of bison they hunted could be found, and the Black Hills could not support 30,000 Lakota through hunting and fishing alone. But it is said Tashunka Witco (Crazy Horse) was born on the banks of Rapid Creek, and when the wasicu (non-Indians) finally arrived in 1876 – their principal population center, their “Gateway to the Black Hills,” took root on the banks of this very creek. Not two years later, all the Lakota were on reservations, and then the railroad came, and the 20th century came, and towns like Spearfish and Sturgis and Belle Fourche lost the battle for supremacy with the little city on the banks of Rapid Creek. Soon, Rapid City was twice their size, and just kept growing, and not soon after that you had to go as far west as Casper, Wyo., as far south as Cheyenne, Wyo., as far east as Sioux Falls, as far north as Bismarck, N.D., to find a city of comparable size and significance: like the beautiful Black Hills that loomed above and beyond it, Rapid City became a refuge for keen-spirited locals fresh off the unforgiving prairie seeking to make a better life for themselves. By the time the Depression rolled around Rapid had started to take on its modern demographic. Those with money favored the west part of town, beyond the gap, and the city center burgeoned just east of the gap. Working class wasicus gravitated toward the tidy little neighborhoods of South Rapid, but north of Omaha Street, north of the railroad tracks, a distinctly separate section of Rapid City morphed into reality. An urban Indian community formed in the heart of North Rapid, and the rest of Rapid City heaved a sigh of relief that they didn’t live east of the gap and north of Omaha Street. Each of the three section of Rapid City had a junior high school, and where the Maple Avenue underpass is now, there was a rickety barb wire fencing surrounding a large marshy white alkali meadow, some rusty car bodies, some scattered tires and a few shelled out utility buildings. On a small rise overlooking this meadow, a school was erected in 1959. They named it North Junior High. Ten percent of Rapid City was Indian, but about 33 percent of the students at North Junior High were Indian. Most of these students played sports. They were gritty, crafty competitors, and they dabbled at football and baseball and boxing – but what they really loved, the sport where their natural talents were most spectacularly displayed, was basketball. There were three ways for young men to achieve urban Indian status: You were funny, you could fight, or you could ball. There was no other way. Beyond basketball, the Indians and wasicus in North Rapid had to live together. Most of the wasicu ballplayers, knew the Indian personality, the mannerisms, the expressions, and the humor. Growing up around Indians had changed them, and growing up around wasicus had changed the Indians. This produced a common identity for ballplayer who hailed from North Rapid, and ballplayers from South Rapid unwittingly keyed in on this common identity and were themselves altered by it. Separated by their gap and their privilege, the West Rapid ballplayers seldom factored into this dynamic, which is just as well, as soon as they would have their own high school and never ball with the other sections of town save as spirited rivals. Originally, Rapid City High School competed as the Tigers, but in 1934 the team became the Cobblers, in honor of Coach E.N. Cobb. A “cobbler” is a person who makes or repairs shoes, or it means “to make or put together roughly.” Not the most flattering moniker for your sports team, but preferable to the disturbing imagery of more accurate alternative, “Cobbers.” Over the course of the next few decades Cobbler Red dominated west of the Missouri River. But it wasn’t until Dave Strain became head basketball coach in 1963 that Cobbler basketball separated itself from the statewide competition. Over the next quarter century that would be great players and great teams all across the state, but no team would sustain a level of basketball excellence comparable to Dave Strain’s Cobblers. Strain makes no bones about why the Cobblers were able to achieve this: “To me, the difference was the Lakota athletes.” Which is a nice thing to say, but did they really make all the difference? “Oh, yeah,” he says, “we had them and they didn’t.” “They” being all those other teams in communities where Indians might or might not be common, and for whatever reason, despite a gifted Indian ballplayer here or there, had no tradition of Indian participation, and weren’t losing any sleep over it. Dave Strain was born “halfway between Mission and White River” in 1931, far out on the lone prairie just north of the Rosebud Indian Reservation. “We had a ranch,” Strain says, “alfalfa and grain, and a seed mill.” It is hard for some folks who have known only Dave Strain the basketball coach/biology teacher, to picture him young and athletic, bringing the ball up court, canning a fade away jumper, opening his senior year at South Dakota State as a starter. Strain is a plump, short-limbed man of modest height, and in his signature rumpled suit, a far cry from a fashion plate. Maybe when he was young he wasn’t especially funny, or especially handy in a fight, but had he grown up in North Rapid, he would have enjoyed plenty of status – because he could play ball. The Strain family was non-Indian, but like many of the players he would coach in the decades to come, Strain was exposed to Indians from an early age. Life wasn’t easy in that rough county back in the first few decades of the last century. “In order for any of them to survive,” Strain says, “Indian or white, you pretty much had to get along.” As Strain grew up he saw Indians not only as a natural part of his would, but “the Indian figure was kind of a hero type to me, and I got fully immersed in it playing sports.” “I played with, but mostly against, the Indian ballplayers,” Strain says. “The best player I ever played against in high school was Stewart Prue of St. Francis.” “Prue” is a common Rosebud surname, and twenty year later, Strains best player ever at Rapid City, Marty Waukazoo, would come from this same Sicangu family. Strain became assistant coach at Rapid City in 1961. By 1964 his Cobblers were 21-4, and the top rated team in the state. Rapid City was voted out of the Black Hills Conference the next year. Throughout the remainder of the 1960’s the bid independent out west would become the premier force in South Dakota basketball. The North Rapid pipeline was about to kick in. “We had 14 or 15 All-Tournament players out of North Junior High.” Strain says, “Which is more than any high school in the state. And I’m not talking about junior high school now, the high school, whether it’s Sioux Falls Washington or Mitchell or any of them….and over half of those were Indian athletes. As talented as these boys were, North Junior High was no sports powerhouse, even in basketball. Many had never experienced winning basketball l until they suited up for Dave Strain. The gym classes at North Junior High were loaded with Indian basketball talent in the 1960’s and 1970’s. A good many never made to high school but a select few had talent any All-Tournament selection would envy. No point in listing names. It would just be a testament to their failure, and the failure of a system where adult authority figures had convinced them they were superfluous and inferior. Opportunity and success were alien concepts. There was the reality of welfare shacks and food stamps and rampant alcoholism and overt community racism, especially at school. Strain admits he had no real plan to change all that, and a number of potential basketball stars still slipped through the cracks. But a critical number of Lakota and working class poor white ballplayers didn’t, and they formed heart and soul of dozens of great Cobbler basketball teams to come. Strain had a simple philosophy when it came to coaching: “What I wanted to do in regard to athletics was recognize what someone could do and make sure they got the opportunity to do it.” A lot of people talk this talk, but Strain put it into practice, day by day, student by student Indian or white, team by team, year after year, for a quarter century. It worked something like this: C.P Jordan and Tony Jones with the Rapid City Indian Men’s Club would help organize prospective players and get them wired into the system. Assistant coach Kenny Knapp would work closely with the junior high school coaches where those prospective ballplayers played their fires serious, organized ball. “Knapp was a product of North Junior High,” Strain says. “He did a really nice job of going down to the junior high schools and watching their games and working with their coaches.” Those coaches were Don Weiland at North, Bob Collins at South, and before the high school split, Red Thomas at West. “Weiland would call me up in the morning wanting to know where we could get an open gym.” There Strain and his staff would develop future ballplayers. “They were all longtime coaches, very competent, and so you had good continuity and stability. Some days at practice key players would be missing. Strain would turn to student manager Francis Waukazoo. “He knew the Indian community inside-out.” Strain says. “I’d send him out to find ballplayers, and the thing about the Indian community, it wasn’t hard to locate anybody.” Sometimes Strain would knock on a door but the people inside wouldn’t answer and so, “I’d just walk right in.” They were fine with that. He’d say, “where’s so and so,” and they’d reply, “Oh he’s over at this place or that house,” and Strain would eventually have him back in the gym. He wouldn’t let these kids go, wouldn’t let them fade into their Indian ghetto obscurity. The Cobblers were again the top related team in 1965-66. “Marty Waukazoo came down with the flu at the state tournament, “Strain says, “and we got beat. But he was a junior then and as a senior we really didn’t have anybody but Marty and we was runner up that year (66-67)” Waukazoo was a 6’4” beanpole with dark glasses and a crew cut. The state had seldom seen his likes before and not many of his ability have come along since. “Marty Waukazoo is the greatest basketball player that I have had the opportunity to coach,” Strain says. No discussion about Waukazoo should exclude the unfortunate moment at the 1967 Class “A” tournament in Sioux Falls. Rapid City met “a strong Miller team” in the opening round and found themselves down by 14 points in the second half. At that point Waukazoo took the game over. Strain wrote of that game: “(Waukazoo) would rifle a pass to an open teammate, come up with a floor-burning steal and a needed basket or trigger an electrifying fast break from a hard-fought defensive rebound. The game in hand, Strain gave Wakazoo a deserved rest. When Wakazoo left the Miller game, Strain wrote, “He was booed by the near capacity crowd. He was booed after delivering a performance of excellence for his team that five the fame its true existence.” “I couldn’t feel the emotion of those boos for Marty,” Strain concluded, “but they must have hurt. They must have hurt a lot. Yet he never talked about it.” Two years after the greatest Cobbler player graduated the greatest Cobbler team steamrolled to the state championship. In a span of two years these boys would win 27 straight. There were the twin towers of John Dutton and the late Steve Withorne (Pine ridge Agency); the competitive grit of Jack Tennyson. Strain says most consider the 1972 Miller team the best of all time. Miller was what Strain called “a very eye-pleasing club.” But the Cobblers clubs were not about eye-pleasing play. They certainly could have been. Flashy undisciplined antics are considered the signature feature of Indian ballplayers. Strain stressed pesky man-to-man defense, and when it came to offense, he “liked to discipline from the standpoint of shot selection. If you just let a player go, ego took over.” With his first state championship under his belt and a strong nucleus returning, 1969-1970 should have been another championship season for Strain. But Rapid City had been growing, growing in a way the city planners had not foreseen. There seemed no reason for the city not to grow east but the city grew back into the Hills through the gap instead, and a sense of separation and superiority were made manifest by the opening of Stevens High School that school year. Rapid City High School was now called Rapid City Central. The gap suddenly became an unambiguous line of social demarcation. If you lived east of the gap, you were a Central Cobbler, and if you lived west of it, a Stevens Raider. Up on Eighth Street, where the locals cruised, the collective identity of the city’s youth was splitting down the middle like an amoeba. In a few years no memory of having ever won or rooted for Cobbler Red would remain in the Silver and Blue Raider faithful. The juggernaut years were behind Coach Strain. From this point on he would mostly have to claw his way to the state tournament with .500 quality ball clubs, telling his charges to “stay focused on the big picture.” When experts describe a team as a “tournament team,” nothing better describes Central’s ball clubs from 1971-1986. The first three years after the split the Cobblers missed the state tournament twice. It seemed that without the luxury of the extra enrollment Strain had before the schools split, Strain could not put a product superior to the Raiders on the floor. Stevens didn’t appear to need or want Indian ballplayers; they had made back-to-back trips to state just fine without them. It seemed inevitable that the new kid on the block, from the privileged side of town, with the new shiny high school, and cool sports mascot, would supplant the tired old Cobbler dinosaur in basketball supremacy. Coach Strain said of the losing 1973 squad in the school yearbook: “Next year we have a good underclassman nucleus coming back and this will provide a good foundation. These are probably the most common words to come out of a losing coach’s mouth: the low calorie war cry of the Brooklyn Dodgers fans – “Wait till next year!” But the 1974 team would win 14 in a row, losing only in the state final to the heavily favored Yankton Bucks. Strain soon hit the nadir of his 25- year run at Rapid City Central. The 1976 team was woeful, going 8-13 and the 1977 team was even worse finishing 5-15. “One good thing we never did was go out looking for a player,” Strain says. “We had loyalty within our ranks because of that. Many non-Indian schools had outstanding Indian ballplayers on their club. What made Central different was they also had average Indian ballplayers on their squad. During Strain’s coaching years, Central probably produced more Reservation high school in the country. And maybe this is what Coach Strain should be most proud of. A guy didn’t have to be better than the non-Indian player to get a fair shake. He just had to work hard. People think racism is just a blatant , obvious thing: men in white hoods burning crosses and chanting “White Power!” but it is the racism a person perpetrates or experiences in a normal day interacting with everyday people that defies us as a society. This is the Rapid City racism Lakota people know best, the racism of a waitress grudgingly handing them the menu at a restaurant: a shop clerk trailing them up and down the aisles to make sure they don’t shoplift something: a newspaper article lamenting how the “wrong” team went to the state tournament. Cities like Bismarck, and Casper, and Billings, are surrounded by Indian reservations. Occasionally their rosters feature an Indian ballplayer. But why didn’t any of these schools produce the legacy of Indian basketball excellence that Dave Strain’s Cobblers did? Strain described those years as “a time where white and Indian sweat ran together in a common cause.” Strain had a system: he had created an environment where a ballplayer form any economic or cultural background felt like the Cobblers were his team. After Strain left Central, the North Rapid pipeline gradually broke down. No person did this out of maliciousness or design. They just did not understand there was a pipeline, and so had no clue what would happen if it broke down. Lakota ballplayers were gradually alienated and the Rapid City Lakota community responded by publicly criticizing the Cobbler coaching staff, something that had never happened during Strain’s time, even during the militant AIM turmoil in the 1970’s. During the final years of the last decade, Centrals bounced back after a four year drought. Why? They had rebuilt their system. They had developed the same system Stevens had. This system does not acknowledge the Lakota legacy Strain established. It is still a good system. It can produce winning basketball. But it won’t produce what Strain did. Without the enthusiastic participation and support of Lakota ballplayers, without the unquestioning identification with and loyalty to Cobbler Red, the days of Strain’s domination of rivals are over. During the quarter century Strain led the Cobblers, Lakota boys had a legacy from Vince Whipple to Duane Long Pumpkin to uphold; they were an integral part of the school persona, and they fought for the school like young Lakota men have always fought for the things that matter to them. They fought like warriors. “People ask me,” Strain says, “did you ever have a team that didn’t have an Indian athlete on it. And I say, not a good one.” (Contact editor@nsweekly.com for more information) Copyright permission by Native Sun News
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