In his only season (1990-91) as the head coach of the Festus High School boys basketball team, Rod Gorman led the Tigers to the Class 3A state championship.
Then he was gone.
Intriguing, I thought. Did that success lead to a much better offer somewhere else? Why would a young coach win a state title and leave? A rarity, indeed. Of course, there could be any number of reasons that have nothing to do with basketball. The full-time means to the coaching end in high school is the education part.
Gorman taught in-school suspension. He didn’t want to do that anymore. Mystery solved, and certainly not worth investigating any farther than asking him the question. Gorman has coached and taught for 39 years. He’s been the head coach for Bunker High School for the last six seasons. The high school is located in Bunker, about an hour southwest of Festus.
“A lot of things played into that. I was young,” Gorman said before he brought his unbeaten Eagles (20-0), a Class 1 team, to play Class 5 Festus on Jan. 30. Gorman had coached at Bourbon High for three years before coming to Festus. “I loved my players, our AD and principal (at Festus), but there were things professionally that weren’t good for me there. I didn’t leave on bad terms.”
Festus beat Nevada 77-63 to win the Class 3A state championship in Springfield in 1991. The Tigers also beat Malden, St. Francis Borgia and Osage during their playoff run. That same year, under head coach Ron Rhodes, the De Soto girls finished third in the state in Class 4A. Rhodes guided the Dragons to the only girls state titles in the county in 1988-89.
With new coach Bret Reese for the 1991-92 season, Festus lost to eventual state champion Charleston in the sectionals. Reese only coached the Tigers for one season and then Joby Holland took over for the next three.
Not only did the Tigers win state in 1991, but the entire program (freshmen, JV, varsity) finished first at every tournament. After the Bunker and Festus JV teams played, many of the players from the 1991 team were on hand to receive championship rings with Gorman, who hadn’t seen most of them since that year.
“I appreciate Festus doing this for the 1991 team,” Gorman said. “The only way we could guarantee me being there this time of year was to play them.
“(Festus) has great size and they shoot the ball really well. When they get their outside-inside game working, that’s hard to defend. You’re dealing with the big bodies.”
Bunker dug in after halftime and beat the Tigers 55-50 (see related story), disproving the theory that small schools can’t beat larger ones. And this is a really good Festus team that’s 5-0 against the teams in its conference and capable of winning a district championship.
“All year we’ve been resilient in coming together to get better,” Gorman said. “Honestly, what everyone saw tonight is what I see every day.”
A large crowd followed the Eagles to Festus and cheered loudly behind the Bunker bench.
“They show up everywhere we go and we appreciate them,” Gorman said. “I don’t know that it could be better.”
Now toward the end of his career, I’d say it could be better with another state title. Gorman has also coached and taught at Cape Girardeau Central High, Houston High and Logan-Rogersville High.
In the course of doing research for this story, I received help from an employee at the Festus Public Library, who found newspaper articles from that season in the News Democrat. The first thing I noticed was Warren Hayes wrote the stories about the Tigers that year. Since the Leader didn’t start until 1994, we didn’t have any resources on that season. When the Leader started publishing, Hayes became its main resource as the sports editor, a post he served non-stop for the county until his death in 2010.
Gorman told Hayes the day Festus beat Nevada, “We were due for a good game and really played our best game of the season today against good competition. We saved our best for the last game.”
De Soto was the only team to beat the Tigers that year and by 1993 the Dragons were third in the state in Class 4A.
A Festus senior in 1991, Jim Jones, told Hayes, “We had a lot of athletic ability, but our team chemistry was the biggest thing we had going for us. We played as a team, and the best team won the championship.”
Festus has won state championships in baseball, cross country, girls wrestling and track and field in recent years, but a boys basketball team from the county hasn’t advanced to the final four since De Soto in 2003. After 1991, MSHSAA moved state basketball from Springfield to the Hearnes Center at the University of Missouri. That’s where it stayed until moving across the parking lot in 2005 to the Mizzou Arena, the current venue.