1966 Coal Creek Central

COAL CREEK WINS 1966 CRAWFORDSVILLE SECTIONAL
By Bob Whalen

     Coal Creek was a consolidation of New Richmond and Wingate and opened in 1954. It is now part of North Montgomery.
     Coal Creek entered the 1966 Crawfordsville Sectional with the best record they had in their eleven year history. Their record was 16 and 5. The five loses were to Waveland, New Market, Linden, New Market again and in their final game of the regular season to Fountain Central in double overtime.   They played the first game of the tourney with Crawfordsville (12-8) and defeated them by a 91 to 79 score in what might have been called a slight upset. In their second game they defeated Ladoga by a 73 to 60 count. This put them in the title game with New Ross who they defeated 73 to 63.

     They advanced to the Regional at Covington. There were FOUR teams in this regional who had never won a Regional Title. Bainbridge defeated Fowler 90 to 70 and Coal Creek defeated Turkey Run 82 to 75. In the
regional title game Bainbridge defeated Coal Creek 85 to 74. The star of this Bainbridge team was Larry Steele. He scored 19 points in each regional game. The coach of Coal Creek was Phil Miller who was in his first season. He coached two more after this one. The starters for Coal Creek were Rick Stonebraker 14 points per game. (Just in case you might wonder if this Stonebraker was a relative of the great Homer--- maybe very distant.)Chuck McKnight 10 1/2 per game, Larry Lidester 18 per game, Lee Fouts 13 1/2 per game and Denny Mennen 10 per game. The 6th man was Rick Haas with 6 points per game. The first three were seniors and the next
two were juniors. Haas was ONLY a freshman. Their team was made up of seven seniors, four juniors and one freshman.
     In 1969 Coal Creek also made it to the title game after they had defeated New Market and Waveland with very little trouble but they had to play Crawfordsville for the title.Crawfordsville defeated them by 9 points to advance to the Frankfort Regional. These were Coal Creek's ONLY two trips to the Crawfordsville Sectional Title Game.

(Copyright by Bob Whalen 1999)

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