Central High School
Central High School, date unlisted
Built: 1916
National Register of Historic Places: 1980
Currently: Central Park Condominiums
Some local histories suggest that the first basketball game ever played west of the Mississippi River was played in Red Wing. According to Minnesota basketball historian Marc Hugunin, though, this is very likely nothing more than an urban legend.
But it’s understandable how that folk tale came to be, because in those early years of basketball, the 1890s and early 1900s, Red Wing was a powerhouse.
At that time, basketball was primarily played by local militias, essentially the precursor to today’s National Guard. This is because those militias were set up in armories, and the armory buildings were typically the only structures with ceilings high enough for basketball games.
The best of the local militia teams was Company G, who weren’t just the city’s top team, but one of the top teams in the western half of the United States.
When the men, still at the top of their game, were deployed to the Philippines for the Spanish-American War, their basketball was mostly put aside. They did still find time to play at least one game, which Hugunin believes to be one of the first basketball games played in Asia.
Upon their return, the men of Company G, whose best players were known as the “Steady Seven” continued to play to great acclaim. They were sponsored by other organizations, including the local branch of Red Men, and in 1906 they toured the western United States where they won 26 of the 32 games they played.
Eventually the “Steady Seven” aged out of their athletic primes, and fan attention turned toward the high school team.
The Company G Basketball Team
Front row: Francis Kempfe.
Middle row: Joe Wally, Al Rehder, Mike Kappel, and Bill Conlin.
Back row: E.P. Neill, Ron Hawkins, and Goodwin Esterly
From 1917 to 1995 this was Central High School. And in the earliest decades of Minnesota’s State High School Boys Basketball Tournament Red Wing was a mainstay.
The Red Wing team appeared in the very first state tournament in 1913, and won the school’s first title in 1915.
They won their second title in 1920, then won again in 1922, lost the championship in 1929, and won their fourth title in 1933.
Across the rest of the 20th century, Red Wing lost four more championship games–in 1940, 41, 57, and 71. Multiple teams tied Red Wing’s mark of four championships, but no team ever surpassed it.
Then, in 2002, met one of the other schools with four titles, Patrick Henry, now known as Camden, in the state final, with the record-breaking fifth title on the line. Patrick Henry won the game, 61-44. The boys have not made it back to the championship since.
The Red Wing girls basketball team, who didn’t have a state tournament to participate in until the 1970s, was defeated in the championship in 2013, leaving Red Wing’s high school teams championship-less since 1933.
Carl Nordly of the high school basketball team. Nordly was a member of the 1920 championship team. And in a long career as a coach and physical education teacher, served as the head coach of the University of Minnesota Men’s Basketball team from 1942-1944.
