Penn State men’s basketball head coach Pat Chambers and his latest team, featuring four freshmen and a veteran junior from the talent-rich hot bed of high school basketball in Philadelphia, has once again given fans hope for the long-term future of the program.
Men’s basketball has had some proud historical moments over the decades, but not enough to garner much attention nationally. That’s what Chambers and his staff intend to change during the next few years.
It’s easy to be skeptical because there have been numerous times in the past where other coaches and players have had Penn State on the cusp of a national breakthrough only to falter for one reason or another. The most successful period was in the 1950s when Penn State made three appearances within four years in the NCAA Tournament, including a third-place finish in 1954. One also can point to the 1990s as a mini-era where the Nittany Lions seemed poised to break into the basketball elite, only to stagnate and regress again. Basketball as we know it today is far different than when James Naismith invented the game in Kansas in 1891. Six years later, basketball became Penn State’s fourth intercollegiate sport (and first indoor sport) after baseball, football, and track. Although Naismith’s concept has stayed the same, the rules and the way the games have been played have often changed.
For example, just look at the scores of the two games against Bucknell played by that pioneering Penn State team in 1887 — a 24-4 loss in the first game in Lewisburg and a 10-7 win in the home opener. What’s more, there was no coach until 20 years later as the students organized and ran the teams with the elected captain in charge. One of those students on the 1910-11 squad was Cumberland Posey, Penn State’s first black athlete, who left school after two years and went on to become famous as player and owner in professional African-American baseball and amateur and pro basketball. He is the only player ever inducted into both the baseball and basketball halls of fame.
The student-managed teams did well, with just six losing seasons, and they had a streak of nine winning years before Burke “Dutch” Hermann, captain of the 1909-10 team, became the first coach in 1916. Hermann, a history professor, went on to coach until 1932 (except for one year during World War I). In six seasons, from 1919-20 through 1924-25, his Nittany Lions were 73-13, with five of those defeats in the 1921-22 season. His star player, John Reed, led the team in scoring for three years and was the first player in Penn State’s history to score 500 points (503). Frank Wolf set a single-game scoring record of 36 points against Susquehanna in 1919, and he is still tied for eighth in the Nittany Lion record books with five players, including more familiar names such as Mark DuMars, Ron Brown, and Joe Crispin. Alas, Hermann’s teams began to slide in 1925-26, and he stepped down after three consecutive losing years.
Keep in mind that Hermann and five of the men that followed him were professors first, part of the faculty, and coaches second. That didn’t end until 1968-69 when Penn State hired John Bach, who had been a successful head coach for 18 years at his alma mater, Fordham. Also, for the first half of the twentieth century, basketball was not the primary sport for most players. William “Mother” Dunn, Penn State’s initial first-team All-American football player, was captain of the 1904 and 1905 teams and almost made the 1908 US Olympic team as a discus thrower. Glenn Killinger, a three-year starter on three of Hermann’s standout teams and captain of the 1920-21 squad, is in the College Football Hall of Fame after being a first team All- American halfback in 1920.
Several of Penn State’s multisport athletes received financial aid in the early 1900s, but for 20 years, from 1928 through 1948, scholarships were banned for all athletes as the school de- emphasized varsity sports. In fact, the first official basketball scholarship wasn’t given until the 1949-50 academic year. The man who received it, Herm Sledzik from tiny Elders Ridge High School in western Pennsylvania, went on to co-captain the 1952-53 team during the glory years of Penn State basketball. However, financial aid for basketball remained tight until the late 1960s, and the team still depended on multisport athletes, some on partial or full scholarships in other sports.
That’s what makes John Lawther’s success as head coach from the 1937-38 through 1948-49 so surprising. Lawther was a serious academic with a psychology degree from Westminster, a small college in northwestern Pennsylvania, and had been that school’s basketball head coach for nine years before moving to Penn State. He took over the Nittany Lions just as intercollegiate basketball was transitioning from a regional entity into a national sport.
It wasn’t until the postwar 1940s and the 1950s that basketball began to crash the baseball-football-boxing-horse racing dominance in the nation’s sports culture. The now ultrapopular NCAA postseason tournament began modestly in March 1938 with eight teams. That was one year after the National Invitational Tournament (NIT) started with six teams playing in New York’s iconic Madison Square Garden. For two decades, the NIT was the premier postseason event.
Lawther’s 1941-42 team, with his ultimate coaching successor Elmer Gross as co-captain, would be Penn State’s first one to make the NCAA Tournament. By the time the Nittany Lions made their debut in the NIT in 1966, the NCAA had surged far past the NIT in prestige. Eventually, the NCAA took control of the NIT and made it the secondary postseason event it is today.
Still, it was quite an accomplishment for Lawther’s 1941-42 team to make the NCAA Tournament. There were just eight teams, with four teams to two regions, East and West. In its first game, Penn State lost to eventual NCAA finalist Dartmouth, 44-39, but defeated Illinois for third place in the East Region. With a final record of 18-3, that team was the best in school history until Gross took the 1951-52 squad back to the NCAA Tournament.
Lawther, now credited with helping to develop the sliding-zone defense, did not have a losing season until 1945-46. One of his players, John Barr, captain of the 1940-41 squad, is considered
by some historians as Penn State’s best basketball player in the first half of the twentieth century. The Shamokin native was the first Nittany Lion to win All- American honors, as honorable mention.
He also was the first to play professionally, but not until after service in World War II, when he spent three years in the American Basketball League and another in the Eastern Basketball League.
When Lawther’s teams started to struggle in the postwar years, he decided to concentrate on academics and eventually became associate dean of the School of Physical Education. His two proteÌgeÌs, Gross and John Egli, co-captain of the 1942-43 team, would lead Penn State’s men’s basketball through its most successful period.
In 1952, Gross took his 20-4 Lions into the 16-team NCAA Tournament where it had the misfortune of playing No. 1 Kentucky in the first game and lost, 82-54. Two years later, his 1953-54 team, sparked by captain Jack Sherry, almost hit the jackpot, going all the way to the Final Four in the 24-team tournament and finishing third. That was during a 35-year span (1946 to 1981) when a consolation game was part of the tournament, and that third-place trophy can be seen in the Penn State All- Sports Museum. The 1953-54 team has been the most celebrated of all Penn State basketball teams and featured the Nittany Lions’ greatest basketball player, Jesse Arnelle. Not only is Arnelle still the men’s basketball team’s only first-team All-American but the scoring and rebound records he set also continue to be at or near the top in the team’s record books.
“We didn’t think of ourselves as an elite basketball team,” Arnelle told Town&Gown in a 2011 interview. “We played over our heads. … Individually, we were not what you call talented guys, but collectively, we became a really good basketball team.”
After the Final Four, Gross turned the Nittany Lions over to Egli, who had been an assistant coach going back to Lawther. Egli had Arnelle and Penn State back in the NCAA Tournament that 1954-55 season, but they lost in the regional semi finals. It would be another 10 years before Egli’s team returned to the NCAA Tournament, but, unfortunately, the Lions lost the first game to eventual third-place finisher Princeton, 60-58. Bob Weiss, co-captain of that 1964-65 team, went on to become Penn State’s most successful professional player and coach.
After graduation, he spent 13 years with seven teams in the NBA and, except for four years coaching in China in the 2000s, he has been coaching in the NBA ever since, mostly as an assistant. This season he is an assistant with Charlotte.
Bach, Egli’s successor, never made it to the NCAA Tournament, but, like Weiss, he also became a highly respected assistant coach in the NBA after leaving Penn State at the end of the 1977-78 season. Although he was head coach of the Golden State Warriors for four years, he is more revered as a defensive assistant, helping Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls win three NBA titles.
If one uses the NCAA Tournament at the top of the measurement stick and the NIT just behind it, then Penn State’s history isn’t looked upon too kindly. Bach couldn’t get Penn State in either postseason affair, and his successor, Dick Harter, reached the NIT only once, in 1979-80, before he gave way to Bruce Parkhill in 1983.
A State College native who played at William & Mary, Parkhill might have been Penn State’s greatest basketball coach of all time if he had not resigned suddenly before the 1995-96 season, virtually leaving basketball. He had the Nittany Lions moving steadily upward, first winning an Atlantic 10 title and then making them competitive in the tougher Big Ten, which they started playing in with the 1992-93 season.
Parkhill’s 1988-89 team made it to the second round of the NIT, and the next year the Lions finished third after losing in overtime to New Mexico, 83-81, in the semifinals. Parkhill’s 1990-91 Atlantic 10 champions went one better, reaching the NCAA Tournament and upsetting No. 16 and fourth-seeded UCLA, 74-69, in the first round in one of Penn State’s most memorable games. Alas, the Lions lost another overtime game in the second round, 71-68, to Eastern Michigan.
After Parkhill left, his assistant, Jerry Dunn, inherited an experienced team that was one of the best in school history. It included Pete Liscky, Dan Earl, and Calvin Booth, who would go on to play 10 seasons in the NBA. The team won its first 13 games and was ranked in the top 10 for the first time in program history.
It finished the regular season with the program’s best record in 21 years at 21-6, but, regrettably, the fifth-seeded Lions were upset by 12th-seeded Arkansas in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, 86-80.
The Lions wouldn’t return to the NCAA Tournament until the 2000-01 season. Led by Joe Crispin and Titus Ivory, the Lions upset No. 5 North Carolina, 82-74, in the second round to advance to the Sweet 16, where it lost to Temple.
“Because of our whole mindset, we didn’t care that it was North Carolina,” Crispin said in a 2011 interview with Town&Gown. “We had high respect for them, but we had a swagger and a confidence about us.”
After that run, however, Dunn’s Lions had consecutive 7-21 seasons. In 2003, Ed DeChellis, another former Parkhill assistant, took over the program. In 2009, after just missing out on an NCAA Tournament bid, he guided the team to the NIT championship. That team was led by Talor Battle, who finished his Penn State career as the program’s all-time leading scorer. In his senior season in 2010-11, he led the Lions to the NCAA Tournament, where they lost to Temple in the first round.
Soon after the season had ended, DeChellis left to become the head coach at Navy, and Chambers, who had been the head coach at Boston University, took over the program.
Now in his sixth season, he is working to make Penn State an NCAA Tournament team on a consistent basis. In an interview with Town&Gown’s 2016-17 Penn State Winter Sports Annual, he talked about the history of the program he now leads.
“I talk about our history as often as I can [to our players],” he said. “We’ve had some great coaches. … So many great coaches here who did amazing things, and so many great players in our history.”
