Dave Schellhase’s many amazing achievements as a Purdue basketball player are legendary. He was named the Boilermaker team’s most valuable player three times and was also a three-time All-Big Ten player. An All-American his junior year in 1965 and a consensus All American as a senior, he led the nation in scoring in 1966. After his college career, Dave was the first ever draft pick by the Chicago Bulls. In 1997, Dave was selected as one of only twelve members to the Purdue Centennial Basketball Team, along with other great Boilermaker stars such as John Wooden, Rick Mount, Terry Dischinger, and Glenn Robinson, and Dave’s jersey hangs proudly in the Purdue gym.
But perhaps the most interesting aspect about Dave Schellhase is the story of his astounding high school basketball days, how it started and snowballed into one of the greatest, but oddly forgotten basketball careers in Indiana high school history. Two forty-five-point games against powerful Evansville teams and this before a three-point line, the leading scorer in a basketball crazy state with a scorching 30.5 scoring average (Larry Bird had a 30.6 average his senior year). Dave’s incredible high school story, and the many photos found in this narrative, captures the essence of that golden age of Indiana high school basketball, and this is how it all happened. . . . .
It was a cold winter evening in 1955 outside the old Central gymnasium in downtown Evansville. Inside the gym it was hot and getting hotter. The Bosse Bulldogs were playing the Central Bears and the gym was packed. The intense rivalry went back for decades, and the gym was so crowded the Schellhase family found themselves sitting almost in the top row of bleachers. “I was eleven,” young Dave Schellhase recalled, “and after the game had ended, I sat there with my parents, dazed with joy, as the crowd, still worked up from the game, slowly made their way down from the bleachers and out the doors. My family and I stayed in our seats, however, waiting for the crowd below to thin. I pointed to a small huddle of players who were just leaving the floor, headed for the dressing room and asked my mother in my most serious tone, ‘How do you get to be one of those guys?
Getting to be one of those guys would become a quest that took the young boy to basketball greatness.
Basketball was invented by James Nasmith in 1891 at a Y.M.C.A. in Massachusetts, but Indiana quickly picked the game up and became a center for the sport. Interestingly too, basketball is first mentioned as having been played in the state at Evansville, Dave Schellhase’s hometown. The Evansville Courier reported in 1893, “A large number of ladies and gentlemen gathered in the Young Men’s Christian Association parlors last evening, making their way to the gymnasium to view a spirited game of basketball. The space in the running-track was occupied, and many persons found their room in the gallery.”
Dave Schellhase’s own interest in basketball came naturally. His father, David Schellhase Sr., was a sports figure in Evansville in the early 1940s, playing basketball for the Central High School Bears where he was a starter and ballhandler at the guard position. The city of Evansville was a hot bed of play with the two oldest schools, Central and Bosse, having a long tradition of rivalry and Reitz High School not far behind. In his junior year, Dave Sr.’s team won a sectional title and were expected to go deep in the tourney. They were upset, however, in the first round of regional play.
The next year Central was picked early on by several Indiana newspapers as a state champion possibility, and Schellhase was one of the primary shooters for the Bears. A local newspaper, for example, headlined how in one regular season game Schellhase’s shooting “was sensational” and the main feature of the exciting contest.
Ironically, Central beat the eventual state champ, Washington, in the regular season but the Bears were upset in double overtime by a weaker Mt. Vernon team in the semi-finals of the 1941 Evansville sectional in Central’s own gym as Dave Schellhase Sr. and his team had an awful shooting afternoon. That December, most of these young men would be going into the military service after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Dave Sr. would see combat in Europe, including at the Battle of the Bulge, and later serve at Camp Pendleton as a called up Marine Corps reservist in 1950.
One might speculate that the disappointment of the sectional loss in 1941, a major one in basketball crazy Indiana, later drew father and oldest son together, especially when young Dave’s exceptional skills began to appear. Perhaps the father hoped the son might be on a team that went deep in the tourney. And a good son would be excited about doing so. In Indiana, this would indeed be a strong bonding agent.
By the 1950s and 1960s Dave Sr. was also a well-known and highly respected sports referee. Dave Jr. remembered how his dad’s officiating “allowed me to see some great basketball players play when I was young, guys like future basketball All Americans Terry Dischinger and Roger Kaiser.” The father also took his young son to the state finals one year, an event that gave young Dave even more desire to be “one of those guys.” Dave’s father also gave his son several important pieces of advice early on about what it would take to be a solid basketball player, advice the son took to heart. Schellhase recalled his father saying, “When you shoot, the ball will either go in, go long, go short, go left, or go right. If you miss a shot, readjust accordingly.” A second thing the father stressed, “If you aren’t shooting at least ten free throws a game, you’re not playing hard enough.”
A final element that was planted in his head was “to always work at getting a little closer to the basket.” These ideas, put into repetitive practice, led Dave to always be totally aware of his movements on the court, enabling him to make adjustments during the heat of a game regarding his long-range shots and allowing him to not be afraid to make hard drives to the basket. He learned to read the floor and play in a graceful, fluid manner all great players seemed to be able to do. The process was, in fact, the early making of one of the best scoring machines in Indiana high school basketball history.
Another element that helped to build Schellhase’s basketball skills when he was in grade school was his playing at an outdoor goal of a neighbors by himself, “my secret court,” as he called it. Here, in his mind, young Schellhase constructed elaborate basketball shooting games between two teams, the imaginary players taken from Dave’s real-life basketball heroes. In the game, taking a shot from far out and making it counted as two points. If he missed, he’d blast toward the basket to get the rebound and try to score, receiving a single point if he did. The latter activity, repeated over and over, would help make Dave Schellhase a feared offensive rebounder.
Dave Schellhase entered Evansville North High School in the fall of 1958, ready to be a Husky. The school was only three years old, and its basketball team struggled, having only achieved 1-15 and 6-15 records the previous two years. The main problem was there were several established schools in Evansville at that time that already had strong sports traditions- public schools Central, Bosse, Reitz, and once segregated and always tough Lincoln, along with Catholic schools Mater Dei and Memorial.
Schellhase’s explosive freshman play brought some hope and excitement to the fledgling North High School. The freshmen team, with Schellhase leading the way, went on to win both the city championship and the tough SIAC conference championship of southwest Indiana. In writing about North’s winning the city title, one sports reporter praised the “all-around excellence of Dave Schellhase,” and after the conference final game, the Washington High School coach, Stu Chestnut, shaking his head in disbelief, called Schellhase, “the best freshman prospect I’ve ever seen.”
Schellhase also got a taste of varsity play his freshman year as well, scoring in the last few games of the season and causing Bill Robinson, a prominent Evansville sports reporter, to note, “Wednesday night Coach Jim Rausch of North sent his ace yearling, Dave Schellhase, into action against Wadesville, and the son of the former Central star of the same name replied with three baskets and grabbed eight rebounds.”
Just when things were going his way, a severe football injury in the fall of 1960 limited Schellhase’s sophomore basketball experiences. Dave finally played his first basketball contest that year when North met Tell City in the Huskie’s sixth contest. Two games later, Dave led North in scoring in a victory over Boonville. His rusty shooting eye needed improvement, as he only hit five of seventeen shots from the field, but he played “like a bear on the boards.” He also led in scoring for the Huskies in the next game, another victory, this time over Memorial. Schellhase played a key role in the next contest too, as North beat Bosse, moving North into second place in the city standings.
The sophomore Schellhase now began to hit his stride. His shooting accuracy back to normal, he led the team in scoring in the next four games, all victories except for the last, a surprising loss to small-school powerhouse Winslow, 57-49. After that game, Schellhase suddenly experienced recurring pain in his injured hip. The next day, a solemn Coach Rausch told a sports reporter, “We took him to the doctor last night and he told us today it was a calcium deposit. He won’t play anymore basketball this year and may also miss the baseball season.”
Dave Schellhase, the incredible sophomore who was so good at everything, now faced the morose possibility of being out of sports indefinitely. A wise Evansville sportswriter, Eddie Cole, however, offered Dave some sound advice in one of his columns. “One of the greatest prospects in Evansville High School history, Dave Schellhase, is suffering from a calcium deposit. A personal word to Dave. Take your time getting back into action boy. You’ve got two years left and plenty of time to heal that hip properly.” It was solid advice and Dave took it.
In his three prior years of coaching, North basketball coach Jim Rausch had emphasized defense and a slow, methodical offense. As the 1960-1961 season approached, however, he decided to go with a high-octane offense, letting two of his players blaze away, a tactic driven by having a senior starter named Mike Volkman, who could shoot the lights out with long distant set-shots, and the up-and-coming junior, Dave Schellhase. It was the latter player that made Rausch the most excited about the season. The overjoyed coach could just see it coming, telling Courier sportswriter Don Bernhardt just before the 1961 Evansville basketball season started, “That Schellhase is going to be a horse. He’s a big man who can hit from out. I think he’s going to show Evansville some fabulous nights of scoring before the season is over.”
Another sportswriter picked North as “the dark horse in city competition.” After North’s first game against Mt. Vernon, however, some sports writers began to consider North as the team most likely to win the city championship. Sportswriter Don Bernhardt wrote, “”Dave Schellhase, a 16-year-old big enough to beat a bear with a switch, crammed in 27 points while cleaning both boards here Tuesday night. Schellhase, a 6-3 junior with large shoulders, took on the dimension of a man amongst boys, scattering the opposition under the boards.”
Schellhase was just warming up. In North’s next game against Bicknell, Dave and Mike Volkman each poured in twenty-six points and the Huskies demolished their opponent.
Game three of the season would present North with its first real competition, the Huntingburg Happy Hunters, at their place. Huntingburg had already defeated strong Jasper and Washington squads and had a 5-1 record. The contest was an Indiana basketball barnburner, with Schellhase hitting seventeen shots, mostly from long distance. Dave ended up with thirty-five points, a new North record. Unfortunately for the Huskies, Huntingburg’s 5-10 junior guard, John Giesler, set a Huntingburg floor record of forty-one points, including nineteen for nineteen at the foul line and the Hunters pulled away to post a 65-61 victory.
The Christmas Holiday Tournament at Boonville that season looked like an interesting event. North had lost but two games and faced a weak but plucky Castle team coached by Tot Nelson. The Dale Aces, who had lost by only two points in the recent game with North, faced Boonville in the other bracket, but looked forward to a likely rematch with North.
Dave was the leading scorer in the Huskie’s easy victory over Castle and almost got North over the hump in the championship game against the Dale Aces. While the Aces “could find no defense” to stop Schellhase from scoring thirty-nine points, a new record for the tournament, they still won in the last seconds of the contest, 59-58. Dale’s coach, Larry Prusz, noted after the game “That Schellhase is a bruiser. He’ll kill you from out, and if he misses the shot, he is right back under the basket to get it again.”
Interestingly, Dave’s storming toward the basket after releasing his shots clearly described the obsessive game Dave played as a young boy at his “secret court,” a game that he worked to perfection and apparently carried with him as a high school player.
For the rest of the season, North High School and Dave Schellhase just seemed to get better, winning eleven games in a roll and claiming a share of the city title and taking the always tough Southern Indiana Athletic Conference title outright. The far-reaching conference was made up of nineteen schools. Dave frequently scored over thirty points in these contests, but he had great support, playing with the likes of Mike Volkman, Ted Mattingly, Gary Pfender, and Joe Mullan. But reporters still loved to write about Dave. After the Lincoln game, Eddie Cole wrote, “Schellhase was never more brilliant for the Huskies as he hit 12 of 20 shots and 9 of 12 free throws.”
North ended the season with a bang, gaining an unexpected but especially satisfying close victory over Castle, a win that brought them the conference championship. The day after the epic contest, the Evansville Courier reported, “The North throng surged to the floor, hoisted Volkman and sensational Dave Schellhase to their shoulders and whooped down the court like Sitting Bull’s Indians. The uphill battle was North’s 11th straight and 17th in 20 starts.”
Coach Rausch was a bit staggered when the 1961 Evansville Sectional draw was announced. The two best teams, North and Central, would play in the very first game. Newspaper sports writers gave North the best chance of winning the game and the sectional, but with some hedging. Coach Rausch sounded concerned too, telling one reporter, “We have to fear Central because of their balance.” The coach’s fear was well-founded. Central, using a height advantage, out-rebounded the Huskies and the Bear’s “sticky” defense kept Schellhase and company off-balanced. The Bears took the victory before nine thousand fans, the largest crowd ever to see an Evansville sectional game at that time by a score of 67-61.
Although Dave Schellhase was devastated by the lost, he was able to reap some joy from the season. He was the leading scorer in the city and was chosen the Most Valuable Player among the city’s basketball athletes. Most importantly, he and his team had another shot next season at winning the sectional and advancing in the state tourney. And by the time the North High School basketball banquet rolled around, Dave was peppy and hopeful again, announcing to the seniors who were graduating, “I really enjoyed playing basketball with you senior boys this year, But I want to go to state- and I want everybody who plays next year to help me.”
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Tremendous anticipation, mixed with more than a little anxiety best described Coach Rausch and his team’s feelings as the 1961-1962 North basketball season approached. The Huskies hoped to repeat their SIAC and city championships and go further in the state tournament than the year before. Dave Schellhase had matured, standing six-four and carrying almost two hundred pounds on his muscular frame. However, gone was one half of the team’s spectacular shooting duo, Mike Volkman. When Mike and Dave played together the year before, it always seemed that when one was off a tad, the other more than picked up the slack. Gone also was little play-maker Joe Mullan, along with big Jim Pfender.
Left besides Schellhase was Ted Mattingly, who was as good a rebounder as Dave and hopefully would step up his scoring in the 1962 season. Steve Schroer, Charles Lawrence, and Mickey Martin would join Schellhase and Mattingly as the starting five for the Husky team.
Early on, one sportswriter, Tony Chamblin, picked North and Tell City as the teams to beat in southern Indiana. Others pointed out that North would have its hands full in the city with a Rex Mundi squad that had everyone back from a 16-6 season and possessed an all-around athlete in future NFL Hall of famer Bob Griese, along with the tallest player in the southern part of the state, 6-7 Bob Niemeier. Then there was Bosse, coached by Jim Meyers who had just replaced the iconic Herman Keller. The tall Bulldogs had one of the state’s very best players, heavily recruited Russ Grieger, and the team would rapidly rise in state polling, holding third place when they finally met North in a game some considered the best high school contest ever played in Indiana. And just east of Evansville, Coach Tot Nelson had a shape Castle team ready to go, one that would be undefeated until the end of the season.
Mt. Vernon was North’s first test, but an event before the game even started might have suggested to a superstitious person that North would have its share of bad luck. While warming up when shooting layups, a North player, Ron Fritz, accidently knocked Schellhase down, the fall twisting Dave’s ankle. Schellhase still managed to score “over a point a minute,” ending up with thirty-five for the game. Evansville reporter Tom Tuley marveled that Dave “also took command on both boards and once even stole the ball at midcourt from a Mt. Vernon guard to drive under for an easy basket.” A perhaps biased Mt. Vernon reporter noted how Dave had “14 field goals from just about every kind of shot possible” but “fired 34 times in achieving the total.”
Schellhase had played the entire Mt. Vernon game on a bad ankle, pushing aside the pain for the sheer joy of playing. The next day he paid the price. Because of the swollen ankle, he missed a day of school but was cleared the next day to play against Rex Mundi. Sports writers were busy playing up the early season contest, one writing, “Although it’s four months before the Indiana basketball tournament begins, the biggest game of the 1961 season in Southern Indiana will be played Friday night at Rex Mundi when the Monarchs test North.” Coach Jerry Altstadt had scouted Schellhase at a North intra-squad game and witnessed Dave knocking in a forty-foot jump shot then smiling at his opponent. “He may not be smiling when we defensed him,” Altstadt told a reporter.
Altstadt was sort of right. Schellhase started out like a ball of fire, putting up eighteen points by the half and boosting North’s lead at the break to a 41-28 count. Altstadt claimed that going to a man-to-man defense and putting Bob Griese on Schellhase in the fourth quarter turned the game around. It was more likely, however, that Dave’s ankle issue began taking a toll, as he failed to score in the fourth quarter. Rex Mundi came back to win the game 67-57. “Husky fans,” wrote Larry Stephenson about the game’s aftermath and while in a poetic mood, “realizing the battle was lost, slumped their heads and cried. The tears were bigger than raindrops.”
Because of the ankle injury, Dave missed the next game against Huntingburg, but several North players stepped up and the Huskies won 55-47, keeping their hopes alive for gaining another SIAC championship. Schellhase came back, still limping, in a North win against Fort Branch, scoring thirty-one points while “still favoring the injured ankle that sidelined him.”
North’s next game was against a talented Tell City squad coached by the great Gunner Wyman. Both teams had only lost one game and were highly thought of when the season began. Tell City, however, had one of their best games of the year against the Husky squad, winning 64-37. Dave Schellhase recalled, “I was too up for the game and came out tight, and it seemed like all their shots were going in. They just flat-out beat us.” Dave also told a reporter, “Gunner Wyman threw that man-to-man defense on us and had his forwards sagging in on me. I felt like the middle of a sandwich.”
Schellhase still managed to get twenty-nine points on one of the worst shooting nights of his high school career.
Over the rest of the year’s contests, Dave got a notch better each game. He took a lot of shots, but he made almost half the shots he took every game, sometimes over half. It helped his cause too that Ted Mattingly and Charles Lawrence were scoring at a nice clip to give the team an added punch and taking some pressure off the Husky superstar.
Schellhase seemed to be on his way to breaking his old scoring record in the game against Vincennes, gaining thirty-four points before fouling out in a game North won. Dave scored thirty-six points against city foe Reitz, his last four shots from thirty to forty feet out. At the first game of the Boonville Holiday tourney, Dave scored thirty-one in a victory over Dale, and in a showdown with undefeated Castle in the tourney final, Dave popped in thirty points, with Mattingly serving up twenty-two. North won in a romp, 75-60.
Then North went down to Kentucky and beat one of that state’s very best teams, the Henderson Flash, 58-55. It was the Flash’s first loss of the season. “Schellhase, never better, scored all of North’s first quarter points,” observed one Evansville newspaper. Dave also broke his old thirty-seven-point record he set the year before, knocking down thirty-eight markers.
After the next game against Boonville, another North win, the Pioneer coach said of Dave to a reporter, “He’s the toughest high school player I’ve seen. I’ve coached upstate and seen many players, but he’s got to be the best.” In their seventh straight win, the Husky team established a new school scoring record, demolishing Memorial 97-59. North Posey fell next, setting up Evansville North against undefeated and third ranked Bosse. It would be a game to remember, perhaps the best high school basketball contest played in Evansville up to that time.
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If you were ever able to travel back in a time machine to see a great Indiana high school basketball game from the golden era of the 1960s, this would be the one to see.
City officials expected that Roberts Stadium would have at least seven thousand fans coming to the Bosse/North game on the winter night of January 18, 1962. The prediction ended up being a tad low. The day before the big game, every sports writer in the city labored to compose something provocative about the upcoming battle—one contrasting it as a game between the new upstart North High School, which had started in 1958, and much older Bosse High School, with its long high school basketball tradition, including back-to-back state championships in the 1940s under Herman Keller. Another article presented the game as a monumental battle between Bosse’s flawless playmaker, Gary Grieger and North’s blond bomber, Dave Schellhase.
Whatever plot lines were created by sports writers prior to the game, none of them came even close to the capturing of the intense drama and the sheer energy of the contest.
The seven thousand, three hundred fans who showed up were restless with anticipation long before the two teams poured onto the court to begin their warm-ups, the gathering cigarette smoke generated by nervous smokers already building up in the rafters and beginning to make its way downward. Remembering his worst game ever at Tell City, and his father’s long-ago advice to learn after a mistake, Dave Schellhase was on a mission to be more relaxed, to let the game come to him. He smiled and laughed some with his fellow players as they ran their lay-up drill, being careful not to let Ron Fritz collide with him, aa he had in the first game of the season.
Sportswriter were everywhere. To Bosse fans’ hysterical delight, their team roared out of the gate, establishing a lead and maintaining it deep into the second quarter. With just less than three minutes in the period, Bosse’s Gene Lockyear and John Wilson “hit a basket a piece and Gary Greiger connected on two straight,” giving the Bulldogs an eight-point lead. Then just like that, Dave Schellhase made several shots “from every area of the floor,” and led “a blitz-attack that enabled North to outscore the Bulldogs 15-4 and carry a 45-42 advantage into intermission.”
The half-time break saw no taming down of the crowd’s excited chatter, or their roars when cheerleaders from both sides led team yells. More than a few Bosse fans worried about Schellhase’s late barrage just before the first half ended but took comfort in the thought that he’d surely be unable to produce like that again in the second half.
Bosse took a quick 47-45 lead at the beginning of the second half. Then Schellhase, a look of complete and fearless intensity on his face, took over, “hitting from out and from underneath.” In the third quarter, he bombed in five baskets in a row. An amazed Tom Tuley wrote about Schellhase the next day, “In one play, he missed, went to his knees to retrieve the ball and then shot when he was just half-way up for two more points.”
Although trailing, Bosse did not roll over when the final period began. The Bulldogs were behind by a single point when Coach Meyers called a time out with forty-seven seconds left in the game to set up a last shot. One could hardly hear themselves think in all the clamor. Tom Tuley wrote, “The crowd, separated from sanity, rattled the rafters.”
The teams came back on the floor. Every fan was standing, most were shouting. With twenty-five seconds left, Bosse’s center, Ken Rakow, hit a short jump shot with twenty-five seconds left.
Bosse fans were on their tiptoes, arms lifted in joy, screaming at the top of their voices. “That made it 83-82 in favor of Bosse,” one next day newspaper report noted, “and it appeared the Bulldogs had done it again.”
North called a time out with twenty seconds to go. Husky fans were subdued, their hands at their mouths, hoping against hope as the North players gathered around Coach Rausch to set up a last shot strategy of their own, a plan the seven thousand, three hundred folks in the gym knew would come to its fruition with the ball in the hands of Dave Schellhase.
The clock began when the ball touched a North player’s hands. Mickey Martin had the ball, bringing it down court. He saw that Bosse’s defense had sagged slightly to protect the baseline, so he flipped the ball over to Schellhase who stood open. Bosse players may have thought Schellhase would try to drive in rather than attempt such a long bomb.
Dave was just in bounds in front of the Bosse bench, thirty feet from the goal when he pulled up to shoot, his body raising to its full peak before he flipped the ball toward the basket. The clock showed twelve seconds as the ball began arching up in a flawless rotation. It was Dave’s last shot of the game, a perfect bull’s eye, “The shot that shook the state,” one reporter called it.
Another court-side sports reporter wrote, “He was on a line with my seat and the second the ball left his hands you knew it was dead center.”
When Bosse rushed a last second shot at the other end and missed, Dave was there to grab the rebound with two seconds left in the game amidst three Bosse players to preserve the win, 84-83. Both Dave and the Stadium had new scoring records of forty-five points, and Schellhase easily led both teams in rebounding, sweeping off twenty-two from the boards.
As the shocked Bosse bench watched the North fans flood the floor, Coach Myers was heard whispering by a sportswriter, “It was destined to go in. He could have thrown it from half court, and it would have gone in.” After the game, talking to a crowd of reporters, Dave humbly gave all the credit to his coach and to the other North players.
The next day, local newspapers bulged with long, colorful, detailed articles about the incredible game, most of the narratives attempting to capture the amazing performance of Dave Schellhase.
Don Bernhardt of the Courier wrote, “The Curly-haired kid with the muscles of a man, made past superlatives seem subdued as he personally took charge in the final minutes to shake Bosse’s status as the state’s third ranking team.” Tom Tuley warned, “Don’t go near the Schellhase. One explored last night at the Stadium in a night that was almost too fantastic to believe. Seven thousand fans watched in awe last night as Schellhase shot down everything in sight to hand Bosse its first defeat in 11 games.”
Bill Robinson called Dave’s efforts, “the most electrifying performance, perhaps the greatest, in local history.”
The dean of Evansville sports writers, Daniel Scism, focused on Dave’s amazing shot that he made after grabbing a rebound and falling to a sitting position, from where he put up a basket. “He indulged in quite a bit of under-the-basket hatchery. He hatched one while sitting on the floor.” The unusual shot was reminiscent of the time John Wooden had made a similar basket while playing in an Indiana high school state tournament game.
North and Schellhase were not done. In the next game, Dave hit for forty points against out-manned Mater Dei, as “the white net tossed and waved time and again as Schellhase drilled home cleanly.” Charles Greer called it “another unforgettable performance.” Greer claimed Dave’s Bosse and Mater Dei back-to-back performances “must rank as one of the top performances by a high school player in Indiana history.”
Tom Tuley simply believed Dave was now “in a class of his own.”
In the next game, a blow-out against Princeton, North received another nice surprise. Ted Mattingly showed his scoring ability, ringing up twenty-eight points, while Schellhase had twenty-six. In the next game, Schellhase hit the forty-five points mark again, this time against Central, the Husky team whipping the Bears 88-62. Charles Lawrence and Ted Mattingly also scored their share of points and made great plays, clearly demonstrating that North was not just a one-man team. After that contest, however, Bill Robinson wrote of Schellhase, “Fans and coaches have run out of glowing words to describe him.”
North beat Lincoln next and Schellhase garnered his average, thirty points, although it was a too close game, 69-64. Mater Dei and Washington were the next victims, with Lawrence and Mattingly continuing to play well and giving North fans even more confidence about North winning the upcoming sectional. At this point, North had already managed to win a share of the city title, tying with Bosse and Rex Mundi.
Castle, loser of a single game to North earlier in the season, hosted the Huskies in both teams’ last contest of the regular season. North was riding a sixteen-game win streak. Although Dave had twisted his ankle badly in the game against Washington, he was still set to play in the Castle tilt.
The Castle gym was packed and “cars were parked in mud and on the grass and a mile down the road” long before the game started. The teams were evenly matched, but Castle looked to be the likely winner as the fourth quarter started, holding a 61-53 lead in a game where Schellhase had been kept mostly under control by the Castle defense. It didn’t help that Dave had set out the last half of the third period with four fouls.
Schellhase simply exploded in the last quarter, pouring in eighteen points and “turning the game into a cauldron of delirium and white heat,” as one sportswriter explained. But it was Charles Lawrence who turned out to be the unexpected almost hero for North, drilling thirty-one points to Dave’s thirty-two. The Husky team, however, lost the game 83-81, throwing away the ball before they could get it into the hands of Schellhase for an attempt at a last second shot.
North, while surely upset at the close loss to Castle, had much to be grateful for as sectional play rolled around. The improving play of Charles Lawrence and Ted Mattingly boded well for the Huskies’ hope of moving deep into the state tournament, and North had received a great draw in the Evansville Sectional, Bosse and Rex Mundi playing in the other bracket. The Husky squad would be playing Memorial in their first game, a team they had crushed earlier, 97-59. Hopes were sky-high for North High School fans.
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Coming into the 1962 sectionals, Dave Schellhase was the leading scorer in the state, and the North Huskies were riding high, having beaten both Bosse and Central in the regular season. An earlier newspaper article about Dave in the Courier that year had talked about what a well-liked and intelligent student Schellhase was at North—an A student who hoped to become a math teacher and coach in high school. Nice looking, smart, polite, and thoughtful, Dave seemed worthy to lead his team to a sectional championship, especially given the loss in the first game of the tournament the year before.
But like an ancient Greek myth, the gods of basketball were about to turn on their fair-haired hero. In North’s first game against a weak Memorial team, almost every fan who wasn’t a part of the North cheering section seemed not to care one bit about what a nice young man he was. Don Bernhardt wrote in detail of the action of fans in that game.
Memorial, with the help of most of the 7,000 fans, rattled super-star Dave Schellhase in the early going and he never got on track. Dave was greeted with screams of Shoot—Shoot! every time he touched the ball. It was a thunderous response from the crowd, and it unnerved the most prolific scorer in the city’s history. Dave hit only 4 of 21 shots before fouling out with 3:13 left in the game. It was his poorest overall effort of the season.
Mattingly and Lawrence picked up the slack, however, both outscoring Schellhase and North won 61-45. Rausch blamed Dave’s poor performance on Schellhase’s still lingering ankle problem but was angry about the fans’ harassment of his star player. “I can’t understand the booing, why there was so much opposition and resentment to one of the finest ball players in the city, an honor student and a wonderful guy.”
The newspapers would later be full of articles and letters to the editor about the behavior of the fans, with one long piece by Tom Fox entitled, “Hoosier Hysteria Carried Too Far” asserting that “Dave Schellhase proved he had character Thursday night. What he lacked was points. What the crowd lacked was character.”
Despite the continuing boos, Dave came back the next game to score twenty-seven points to help blast Mater Dei 82-54, setting up a finals contest between North and Bosse.
A record twelve thousand fans packed into Roberts Stadium to watch the final game of the Evansville sectional. North came out with authority, Schellhase canning eight shots in a row and the Husky team building up a twelve-point lead. The Huskies went into the half time break with a 43-36 lead. A newspaper report noted the Huskies and “irrepressible Dave Schellhase appeared halfway to Utopia before the throbbing struggle was ten minutes old.” North hit nine of their first eleven shots “to catapult into a 22-14 lead and appeared ready for orbit as they poured in 16 of their first 25 to lead the startled Bulldogs by 12 twelve points in the second quarter.”
Schellhase’s early shooting, claimed one sportswriter, “was the most spectacular action many of the record 12,000 witnesses had ever seen.”
Bosse was patient, believing Schellhase could not keep up his level of scoring, waiting for his accurate shooting storm to pass. A big lift also came for Bosse from their tall, slender center, Ken Rakow, who was not typically a high scorer, but who got hot from the key, throwing in twenty-six points.
In the second half too, the taller Bulldogs put on a press and shifted to a rugged man-to-man defense with Grieger taking Schellhase. The Bosse coach believed they could give Schellhase his average 30 points and still win the game. Grieger “held” Dave to Schellhase to thirty-five points before Dave fouled out with 3:46 left in the contest. Bosse’s Gary Grieger put the last nail in the coffin with eleven straight free throws in the second half.
Stunned Husky fans watched their team go down in defeat, 88-71.
Dave Schellhase received a standing ovation when he fouled out of the sectional final game. It did nothing to console him. At the end of his junior year, he had declared his intention for the Huskies to win the sectional and go deep in the state tournament. Now that prediction had been shot down in flames. He told a reporter, “I’ve been waiting to win one of these (sectional title) ever since I was a kid, since I was six years old. But what kid doesn’t? Now I’ll never win one. There have always been two things I wanted to do. First, I wanted to go to the state finals. And second, I always wanted to play on the Indiana All-Stars. Now, I won’t make either.”
Dave Schellhase was wrong about not making the All-Star team, and he would go on to have extraordinary basketball adventures as a Purdue star, for a short while in the NBA, and as a college coach. His high school career, however, as amazing as it was, would be lost in the memory of most fans. Although Evansville and Indiana high school scoring records of all sorts were broken by Schellhase, state-wide fame and long-term iconic recognition would not be forthcoming. North’s bitter defeats in sectional play in both Schellhase’s junior and senior years also left Dave to discover that Indiana high school basketball legends are made in ongoing state tournament play.
Still, Dave Schellhase figured out in a superb manner, “how to be one of those guys.”
