Title Town

 

 Last thing I remember, I was running for the door;

I had to find the passage back to the place I was before,

'Relax' said the night man, 'We are programmed to receive.

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!'

Hotel California, The Eagles

 

JR Chisham has over the years filled a plethora of roles for Monroe City, MO Panther athletics: once a talented athlete, then a long-time, well-known area basketball official, an active member of the Panther booster club and a man always, when asked, ready to lend a hand to help his beloved hometown teams. Chisham lives the mantra, once a Panther, always a Panther.

“When you are from Monroe City, you never, really leave Monroe City,” he says. “When I was in the service, then the years after I was out of the service, but I didn’t live in Monroe City; I was still from Monroe City. I was always looking for a paper to find how the teams were doing. Making calls late on Friday night, wanting to know how we did. Searching the radio dial for game summaries. It just has always been a part of me and that is how this town is. There is a lot of civic pride in supporting the high school teams. We have so many people my age who have not had kids in school for years, still faithfully attending the games, even the away games. Even the year the boys’ basketball team did not win a game, the crowds were still good.”

 

2021 Football

I find writing about high school athletics almost effortless. I would rather tell stories than simply record history. These stories will, if you let them, tell themselves. What is cool is that with teenage athletics, truth really is stranger than fiction. The material base - the brief reign of the schoolboy idol - is a bittersweet paragon of American culture, the setting for Springsteen songs (Glory Days) and Updike novels (Rabbit Run). Who couldn't write about that?

It is concurrently fun, thought provoking, frustrating, controversial, but also next to impossible when discussing different teams and eras to come to a deductive conclusion of who is “best.” With that disclaimer, looking at Monroe City basketball history raises a lot of comparisons and a lot of spin-off theories. Were the most recent five years the best in the history of the storied Monroe City Panthers boys’ basketball program? The numbers in the Edris/Talton era will stand alone, for sure. But argument could be made for other eras, as well. This town has been for many years blessed with good high school basketball. The paradise MC hoops has become is, to put it tepidly, getting extremely crowded.

Obviously, the game has changed dramatically since the end of the Second World War. That’s where - 1946- I want to start.

To give some perspective as to how much the game has changed, go back to the 1946-1947 season. Monroe City, that year, set a new school record for wins in a season with 25. The team averaged 33.9 points per game. That was high scoring in the days immediately following WWII.

Within the decade of the 50’s, mainly due to the onslaught of the jump shot and fastbreak offenses, scoring in high school basketball across the nation skyrocketed, in some cases averages almost doubling. Monroe City was no exception.  By the late 1950’s, gyms and their playing surfaces became larger, as did the athletes. Black athletes, now free from the yoke of Jim Crow, brought a whole different dimension to the game, a city playground style played at a faster and higher scoring pace. To keep up, defenses became more physical and aggressive. The rules and the way the game was officiated adjusted. The set shot had gone the way of the buggy whip.

In the fifteen years after WWII, from the 1945-46 season through the 1959-60 season, MCHS played 499 games of which they won 373. Monroe City did not play football during this time and state scheduling rules were much less restrictive than what they are today. The team would start playing games in October as opposed to today’s season opening games held in late November. For example, in 1948 Coach Morrie Schroeter's Panther squad played 46 games, winning 38. They failed to make the state tournament with a two-point loss in the regional final. Today, the Missouri State High School Activities Association limits regular season games to 26. Under current guidelines, the 1948 program record standard for both wins and games played will never be approached.

Monroe City dominated the area hoops scene from 1946-1960, winning .748% of its games. It must be noted that these were the years preceding school consolidation, when every small town in the northeast section of the state had a high school that sponsored a basketball team. Some even played outdoors. Monroe City played many very small schools throughout these years. Of the eight schools who joined MC in the Mark Twain conference in 1957, six of them today do not even exist, swallowed up by consolidation. Still winning near ¾ of the games played over such an extended period of time is a very impressive accomplishment.

1982 Homecoming

This period also saw the beginning of school desegregation. During the 1955-56 season, Donald Scott integrated the Panthers. Orville Minter was also an early African American player who wore the black and gold. In 1959, Joe Talton began his career at Monroe City and he dominated the area for the next four years. Since 1956, every successful Panther basketball team has leaned heavily on the talents of its black team members.

Some of the winningest and most successful coaches in program history labored during this era. Hall of Famer Billy Key being one of special note.

In the five years before integration, the 1951 through 1955 seasons, the Panthers had a record of 138 wins and 44 losses. In the five years after integration, 1956-1960, the record was 117 wins and 33 losses. Judging by the five years before and after, integration did not significantly affect the Panther rate of success. It was high before and remained high after. From 1946 to 1963 the Panthers had 17 consecutive years of winning seasons.

Great players make for great coaches. Coach Red Sylvarya arrived in the fall of 1959, the same year 6’8” Joe Talton began his four-year Panther career. In those four years the Panthers won 81 games. Red should have left with Big Joe. 1964, the year after Talton graduated and Sylvarya’s last year at MCHS, the school suffered through an 8-19 campaign, its first recorded below .500 mark since 1925.

There was a time when Monroe City High School did not play football. The sport sputtered with a start-up several times during the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s. But the Great Depression, with its lack of funding, and the Second World War, with its lack of male teachers to serve as coaches and gas to travel to games, dominated the nation and doomed small-town football. For over 30 years, the sport in MC lay dormant. In the spring of 1960, the school board, under the leadership and support of long-time superintendent, Galen Lankford, voted to reinstate the sport.

I have traveled the country off and on for the last decade with my ear to the rail, mostly focusing on small rural towns throughout the Midwest, many dying a slow death of social and economic neglect. I wrote the book “Take the High Road,” based on the people I met on my vagabonding adventures. When I stopped to talk to the few old timers still hanging out in these depressed towns, my simple inquiry as to local history would almost always unleash a stream of community pride, often based on the exploits of the high school football team. The undefeated 1948 team- “line outweighed Kansas State’s line that year” – or the 93-year-old town doctor who worked the sidelines every Friday night game until the day he died, or the coach who before he moved on to Odessa and won all those titles, ‘but learned it all here;’ all told with a pride that defied the downtrodden current state of a once thriving community.

Asherton, TX: A field lost in time

In the south desert rattlesnake of a town, Asherton, TX, I found an abandoned football field that stood exactly as it had been left after the final whistle of the last game, fifteen years prior. Having been subjected to neglect and the elements of time, it was an eerily sad sight, even for a stranger like me. It was as if a loved one had died 15 years prior, left to lie where they had fallen, never given a respectful and proper burial. Trojan Stadium was a field lost in time, as if the lights were simply turned off after the last game ever played on this now rotting gridiron, a 33-28 Trojan triumph over Medina. One old timer told me as we stood in the west end zone under the drooping goal posts looking out to the scoreboard, “It was like everyone just went home after the last game (in November, 1998), expecting to be back next year.” But next year never came. And it never will.

Small towns need their high school football team. Small towns need their high school basketball team. Young men need to be allowed to enjoy every opportunity available to them to be a kid. It is a small window.

The first 10 years of the high school football program at MC had no effect on the Panthers success on the hardwood. Between the 1961 and 1970 seasons, Monroe City compiled a basketball record of 277 wins and 93 losses. This is a winning percentage of .748 - ironically the exact same winning percentage to the third decimal that Monroe City earned from 1946 to 1960. That is a consistency of excellence.

The 1970's were a tough decade for Monroe City boys’ basketball. The team’s overall record was 140 wins and 122 losses for a winning percentage of .534. Very acceptable in many towns but a dramatic drop from the MC ultra-successes of the prior 25 seasons.

The fall of fortunes is somewhat misleading (it is actually worse), compromised due to the success of the first team of the decade, the 1969-1970 basketball squad compiling an outstanding 26-4 record and battling all the way to the state quarterfinals. The next nine years, 1971-1979, were abysmal. Six Monroe City teams registered losing records, one finished at .500, and only two finished with winning records and above the .500 mark. A dramatic drop for a program that had been so successful for so long.

So why the record drop? Many theories abound. That the competition got much stronger is indisputable. The small rural schools that the Panthers for years feasted on disappeared from the Monroe City schedule as they were swallowed up by school consolidation. As always though, when a team does not do well, you look at the level of abilities of the athletes. Were the athletes just not as talented? Poor coaching hires? Lack of school administrative support?

 

Track & Field

Monroe City did win several state track championships during the 1970's so one could argue the athletic talent was still high. But, maybe not. Monroe City had for years, and still does, produce outstanding track and field teams with, until recently, some of the worst facilities this side of a third world nation. But a state track championship can be misleading as it is possible for two or even one athlete to alone win the state track title. So, maybe track and field success is not relevant and has no connection to the drop in basketball fortunes.

I think a better comparison is to look at the success rate of the football team during the 1970's. On the gridiron the Panthers compiled a record of 50 wins, 40 losses and two ties for a winning percentage of .555, almost identical to the basketball teams rate of success over the same ten years.

The 1970's were a time before much of the specialization that we see today limited the number of sports high school athletes played. As at any small school in the 1970’s, it is a safe assumption that a majority of the best athletes at MCHS played both football and basketball.

By the 1980's basketball was back on a positive and upward track. The program suffered through only one losing season during the decade and it was a 1983-84 rebuilding year squeezed in between the 1982 team that finished second in the state in the 1986 team that finished third in the state.  The Panthers, in the 1980's, won 194 games and lost 90 for a winning percentage of .683. The football team had a successful decade in the 80's as well, winning 56 games and losing 48 for winning percentage of .538; slightly, but not significantly lower than basketball.

The basketball program began to regress in the 1990’s. One notable exception was the 1995 team that finished 4th in the state. The football team became the envy of the area, compiling a decade record of 96-17, a .849 winning percentage. The winning percentage for basketball slipped to .619. Four men in the 90’s held the position of head boy basketball coach. One was hired in the spring as an assistant football coach and then in the summer “promoted” to head boys’ basketball coach.  One was chosen, according to the Quincy Herald-Whig, over thirty other applicants despite a career head coaching record of 11-82.

Long time booster JR Chisham is candid; “The school made some terrible hires for the head boys basketball position. It really hurt our teams. The School Board listened to some people from outside the district they should have not been listening to. We went through a spell where every couple of years we would run off the coach and then hire a new one only to run him off a couple of years later and then do it all again. It got to the point it was hard to attract a good basketball coach.”

Panther Family Pride

To be fair to the school leaders of past years, it should be noted that short tenure of coaches did not start then. Over the years, despite the astronomical winning percentage of its teams, basketball coaches have passed through like vagrants in the night. Monroe City has never been known for the longevity of its basketball coaches.

Chisham notes, “The school has to be supportive of good coaches. And in the past, hiring and keeping a good basketball coach was not a priority and it showed on the court. That is why we need to appreciate a coach like (current coach) Brock (Edris). It makes a huge difference, and they will have other offers and leave if we don't appreciate them. We need to make Monroe City a destination stop for basketball coaches, and we have never been able to do that. Hopefully, that is changing.”

“When I was in school,” continued Chisham, “our coaches demanded that you went out for other sports. Our basketball coach made us run track. The coaches need to encourage their players to play other sports and the administration should demand that the coaches support each other. The baseball and the golf teams need support just as much as the football and basketball teams, maybe more. Those kids work just as hard. It was at one time that all sports were supported as important, and it should have never been allowed to change.”

By the turn of the new millennium, the bottom had fallen out of the Monroe City basketball program. Records plummeted well below the .500 mark and the program was dying of neglect. The team record for the first decade of the millennium was a very un-Monroe City-like 113-158, by far the worst decade in school history. It would only get worse. Monroe began the decade of the ‘teens, 2010-2011, with a combined two-year mark of 4-44. The team was mired in the midst of a 44-game losing streak that would stretch over three seasons. From 2000-2009, the football team won 70 games while losing 37, a winning percentage of .654.

Coach Edris took over in 2012 a basketball program in total disarray. One of his first big challenges was to stop a two-decade trend of student athletes who were talented enough to play basketball but did not participate - dropping out of the sport often in junior high. He knew otherwise he would never return the roar to MC hoops. A colossal step, Edris has pointed out often, was finally getting in place a junior high coach with a Monroe City basketball background, one whose primary coaching interest was basketball, like Ed Talton. 

Coach Edris has purposely taken a leading role in the football program. He is the team’s defensive coordinator. To his way of thought it was self-preservation. “We need to share the athletes,” he says today. “As the Defensive Coordinator with football, I have a big investment in the football program. The kids know that. Almost all our best athletes are two sport participants. The ones who do not play both sports, well, that is ok, if that is their choice. We are not a big enough school to split talent, if some play football only and if some play basketball only, it will hurt both sports.”

Basketball 2022

For the 2021-22 school year almost all members of the basketball team were also mainstays on the football gridiron and vice versa. How has the collaboration and sharing of athletes worked out? Over the last five years the football team has won a state title and compiled a record of 51-11. Over the same five years the basketball team has produced a record of 102-20 while winning five straight district titles and earning two berths to the state final four. The winning percentage for the basketball team is .836. The winning percentage for the football team is .822. Few small towns in the nation, let alone the state of Missouri, can claim such a five-year “Title Town” level of performance. Monroe City fans are today justifiably button busting proud of their Panthers.

Today, Monroe City is the perfect template to emulate for any small school wanting both excellence and parity amongst the sports it sponsors. In 2022, most importantly, the school leaders have made the athletes themselves the priority. Students are encouraged to enjoy both participation and the benefits of playing multiple sports. As it should be.