Name: “Some Very Clever Teamwork: How Basketball Transformed Youth Sports in Minnesota” with Marc Hugunin
Start: 2024-11-14T19:00:00-06:00
Location: 1862 S. Greeley Street, Stillwater, MN, United States, Minnesota 55082

$\u201cSome Very Clever Teamwork: How Basketball Transformed Youth Sports in Minnesota\u201d with Marc Hugunin$

Kick off the start to winter’s most exciting sport with basketball history. Marc Hugunin will take us into the exciting world of youth sports and the transforming role they played in Minnesota with his book “Some Very Clever Teamwork: How Basketball Transformed Youth Sports in Minnesota.” Marc is a member of the Washington County Historical Society!
In-person attendees:
1862 Greeley Street South
Stillwater, MN 55082
Virtual attendees:
https://www.youtube.com/@wchsmn
About the book:
How Minnesota’s state high school basketball tournament came to be is more complex than you’d think!
On April 5, 1913, the smallest team from one of the smallest schools, Fosston High School, claimed the first-ever Minnesota state high school basketball title by virtue of “some very clever teamwork.” It was also by virtue of some very clever teamwork among the faculty at Carleton College and its friends in the field of secondary education that the tournament was held at all. The participants formed a committee to assure that the tournament would be held again in 1914 and beyond.
More importantly, youth sports in Minnesota would for the first time be administered in the schools. Minnesota today is often branded as the “state of hockey,” but as Marc Hugunin expertly chronicles in this thoroughly researched history, when youth sports first came under the control of the schools, basketball was the tip of the spear, the sport of choice in polite society.
The schools would teach boys how to play the game in a fair and sportsmanlike manner, and would ensure that sports would be the character-building experience that they claimed to be. Beginning with the popularity of the sport of basketball, youth sports and youth culture in Minnesota were transformed from a period of chaos to one of an accepted order.
Copies of Marc’s book will be available for purchase at the event.
About the author:
Marc Hugunin has been a basketball fan for more than sixty years, since his dad first took him to see the local high school basketball team. “The older boys were heroic to me,” he remembers. “I wanted to be just like them.” Hugunin played basketball through high school and has remained a fan and become a writer and historian of Minnesota basketball. With his good friend Stew Thornley, he coauthored Minnesota Hoops: Basketball in the North Star State, published by Minnesota Historical Society Press in 2006. He was the historian for the Minnesota State High School League on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of state tournament basketball in 2012. After blogging about basketball for fifteen years, he launched a comprehensive website and blog, North Star Hoops, where he is known to many as Sunnyday or Sunny. In addition to his interests in basketball and writing, Hugunin also enjoys golf, music, and pizza. He lives with his cat, also named Sunny, in Stillwater, Minnesota, a block from the St. Croix River.