Big deal or not

This week and next my articles are going to be about the 1966 Football Team. A good friend of mine told me after the last article a couple of weeks ago, that a friend of hers had asked her what was so special about the 1966 team?

That kind of threw me for a moment, then I realized that, for a lot of readers, that question is one that needed answering. For the rest of us, the fall of 1966 and the three years it took to get us to that point will always be a "big deal."

My family moved from a farm to a house on North Olive, just a block west of the football field in 1959. I had been attending games for a couple of years before that. Gene Rimmer was the coach in 1959, and for the next eight years I would spend countless hours around the football field and games.

During these years, Nevada did not have many outstanding football seasons. Teams like Aurora, Mount Vernon, Neosho, Carthage, and even Lamar were pretty hard on our Tigers. Irony of ironies, the one team we usually beat during this time was Webb City.

During the fall of 1963, things got pretty bad. One of my all-time favorite coaches, Dan Clopton actually left the program during the season. Rumors and tales of what happened to Dan will have to remain rumors and tales where I am concerned. He was one of the nicest and best men I ever knew. Still he did leave and the program was in trouble.

John McKinley had moved here not long before as the guidance counselor at the high school. He had a lot of experience coaching and playing football before, and he was selected to take over the team and finish out the season. Coach McKinley did a masterful job and Nevada played well over .500 ball the rest of the campaign.

Coach McKinley did not want to be a regular football coach, and so the district began a search to find new coaches to try and bring Nevada football back to respectability. Coach Chuck Shelton who had been coaching high school football in Pratt, Kansas, (I think this is correct, but it is from my memory only), was offered the job. He came here with one of his former 1961 Pitt State National Championship teammates, Moe Cotter as an assistant. Nevada did not just change the football program in the fall of 1964, they also decided to make a clean slate and hired Bill Wynn the former basketball coach at Pleasant Hill, Mo. So for the town and all the athletes in Nevada, the 1964-'65 season was one of change, big change.

Both Coach Shelton and Wynn came into their jobs with the plan that the first thing they would have to change was the attitudes of all concerned. They knew they had an uphill battle, as Nevada did not have a winning tradition. The changes were not just on the field, they were in the everyday lives of the players and the town.

One of the first things they instituted was "iron discipline." That may sound simplistic, but before these coaches came here, discipline was not and had not been a big part of the athletic programs. One of the first things they did was make us cut our hair. You have to remember this was at a time when long hair was an issue in our society. The haircuts you will see in the pictures from those teams were akin to Marine type cuts. We did not like it, but if we wanted to play that was the way it was going to have to be.

There were many other tough rules put in place. Often players and their families thought these new coaches were being too tough. In the end, it was the results that mattered. Both the football and basketball teams began a steady but ever increasing move towards winning. By the fall of 1966 Shelton had improved his teams each year until we had an undefeated season in his third and final year.

In basketball Coach Wynn's teams followed suit with ever increasingly successful seasons. By the same year as the '66 football team, the basketball team narrowly finished runner up to Carthage in the conference. They would go on to win the conference championship the next year.

Coach Larry Testman was the head track and field coach during these years also. He compiled many track championships. He also coached junior high football and basketball year after year, laying the groundwork for future teams.

Was 1966 a big deal? You bet it was. The town and the school were shown how to win and build young men's lives in a positive way. It is a feeling that sometimes I sense we have lost, but that is right there waiting for us to regain once again.

Next week, I will put in my article the stories and memories of many of the players from the team. I think you will be surprised. Many of them don't talk so much about the winning, as they do about the effect these coaches had on their lives. You see to us it was more than winning. It was preparing us for the "BIG DEAL" of life. So if anyone asks you what was so special about those years, ask them how much time they have to hear about a really big deal.