photo by Graphics courtesy Freeborn County Historical Museum

It shows the Albert Lea High School boys’ basketball team that won the district and regional title and also participated in the state tournament that year. In the upper center is the coach, B.H. Wilborn. Just below him was the trophy for winning the regional title that year. None of the players were identified in this composite photo created by local photographer E.V. Hockett.

Albert Lea’s frozen five basketball team

Looking Back

By Ed Shannon | Albert Lea Tribune

Published Saturday, March 21, 2009

One of the most unusual basketball games ever played by the Albert Lea High School boys’ basketball team took place in Austin on Jan. 21, 1927.

That school year the ten students on the A team Tigers coached by B. H. Wilburn “was composed of tall, rangy men and considered one of the best in southern Minnesota,” according to the Ah La Ha Sa yearbook.

Up to the first game of that season with Austin, this local team had won and lost several encounters. One of those opponents was Winnebago High School. The first game was a loss with a score of 12-11, and the second meeting resulted in an 18-13 Tiger victory. Two games with Fairmont High School resulted in a 25-24 win and a 21-19 loss.

However, the most important games on the schedule for the students and many local supporters were the encounters with the Austin High School Packers.

Here’s how the Jan. 19, 1927, issue of Ah La Ha Sa, the name also used for the student newspaper, highlighted the first pending game:

“Austin and Albert Lea will add one more momentous game to the long string of bitterly contested tilts that have marked rivalry of many high school generations when they meet on the Austin floor Friday night. As usual, despite heavy roads, scores of excitement mad, lusty voiced fans will follow the Cherry and Blue to the joust. The band will be along in a specially chartered bus to add its important nit. ...

Some maintain the edge (of this game) belongs to the local aggregation.” Incidentally, at this point the Austin team had won all their games.

The reference to Cherry and Blue was for the Albert Lea school colors at that time. And the reference to “heavy roads” may have been a rather odd prediction for what to happen two evenings later.

By the way, the headline on this news article in the student newspaper was “Packer outfit to feel Tiger claws Friday.”

That Friday evening a convoy of cars and several buses left Albert Lea enroute to Austin on what was then U.S. Highway 16 (now Freeborn County Road 46). Travel on this roadway went fairly well until the Mower County line was reached east of Oakland. At this point a large, long snowdrift was encountered. The line of about 50 vehicles was forced to stop. Adding to the traffic problem was a Mower County snowplow, which became stuck in the snowdrift. Some of the cars managed to get turned around and return to Albert Lea.

About 8 p.m., game time, the Austin coach began to wonder when the Tiger team would appear. He soon became aware of the snowdrift problem and sent several volunteers with their cars to help get the Albert Lea vehicles moving and to start bringing some of the visitors and Tiger players to the school.

According to a news article in the Jan. 22, 1927, issue of the Tribune, “The plow and truck could move but a little distance at a time and then the shovelers would have to dig out the plow. After the former had been freed then it was push and pull to get the cars through the ruts, so deep that the bottoms of the cars dragged the full distance.

“During all this time the high school players, who were not dressed for battling the snow filled roads, either sat in their cars and shivered and shook or else they exhausted themselves pushing and pulling other cars out of the road so that they could get to Austin to play their game. When they did arrive there they were all in but played and put up a gallant battle — showing that they are real sports to go in against a team that was warm and a tough one to face even in the best of condition.”

At this point the game should have been called off and rescheduled. Instead, the game started at 11 p.m. During the three hour interval, groups of Austin students tried to entertain the spectators with various impromptu performances.

The frigid five from Albert Lea High School lost this game with a score of 26-11.

Several people from both Albert Lea and Austin suffered various degrees of frostbite caused by exposure to the below-zero temperatures that night. Also, some of the cars of that era just didn’t have heaters and relied on blankets for warmth.

When the thawed-out Tigers played the Packers again two weeks later, the local team won with a score of 16-9.

The Tigers later won the district title by defeating teams from Blue Earth, Sherburn and Winnebago High Schools.

In the regional tournament at Worthington the Tigers again played the Austin Packers on March 18, 1927, and won with a score of 12-8. The next day the Tigers defeated a team from Houston High School 21-17. Thus, this Albert Lea basketball team became the second local group since the undefeated state champions of the 1919 team to go to the state tournament in Minneapolis.

On March 21, 1927, the Tigers were defeated by the Appleton High School team by a score of 33-17. In a consolation game the next day the Albert Lea team lost 12-8 to a team from Bagley High School.

This ended the somewhat hot and really cold saga of the 1927 Albert Lea High school Tigers boys’ basketball team.

Note: All the basketball scores listed in this article are correct and reflect the type of game which was played in that era. Basketball many decades ago was not a fast run-and-shoot game, but based on careful planning and strategy so that every shot at the basket would be successful.

Also, in that era, all the high schools competed in the playoffs for the state basketball championship, despite the number of students in the school. As a result, in 1927, the Albert Lea Tigers played teams from several much smaller high schools in the district, regional and state tournament playoffs.

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