Sahuaro High School basketball coach Dick McConnell holds the state championship trophy as his team goes crazy around him after winning the state championship game on Feb. 17, 2001. The Cougars won 62-55. Photo by Benjie Sanders / Arizona Daily Star
March 3, 2001: Dick McConnell coaches Sahuaro to a fourth state basketball championship
The most remarkable number of Dick McConnell’s coaching career isn’t the four state championships or the 774 career victories.
It’s that he was one of 126 applicants to be the first boys basketball coach at Sahuaro High School.
On Nov. 21, 1967, nine months before Sahuaro would open, Cougars principal Hank Egbert hired the former Chicago Cubs minor-league shortstop whose only head coaching experience had been at Tombstone High School and two obscure Kansas schools.
For the next 39 years, McConnell justified Egbert’s instincts over and over and over again.
It took McConnell just two years to win a state championship. The ’70 Cougars, led by the Ferguson brothers (Jim and Dan) and the Henry brothers (Neil and Dave) went 22-3. It would get even better.
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In 1982, the Cougars went 28-1 behind David Haskin and John Gwozdz, becoming the last Tucson team to win a state basketball title at the highest classification.
But McConnell saved some of his best coaching for last. Sahuaro won back-to-back state championships in 2000 and 2001, the latter a few days after McConnell turned 71.
The players who keyed Sahuaro’s ’00 and ’01 victories, including Mike Wells and Matt Lohmeier, were the third generation of players with whom McConnell coached a state championship.
McConnell retired 13 days before practice was to begin in 2007. Fittingly, the Cougars were then playing in Dick McConnell Gymnasium.
“I was the junior varsity and freshman coach at Rincon for eight years, and, frankly, I worried at times that I would never become a head coach,” McConnell said. “We were 5-15 the first year at Sahuaro, and I wondered how long they’d keep me.”
It was the only losing season in McConnell’s 39 seasons at Sahuaro.
Growing up in Topeka, Kansas, McConnell was a three-sport standout. Baseball might have been his best sport — he accepted a $2,700 bonus to play four minor-league seasons for the Cubs — but he was also Topeka High School’s starting quarterback and a 5-foot-9-inch floor general in basketball.
He desperately wanted to be recruited by Kansas, Wichita State or Kansas State, but his size scared off most recruiters. Finally, McConnell walked on at hometown Washburn University. How did it turn out? In 1986, he was inducted into the school’s sports Hall of Fame.
McConnell’s introduction to Tucson was happenstance. He spent time in the Air Force at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and decided that the climate was better than that in Narka, Kansas, where in his first varsity basketball coaching job his car “froze.”
“I had to walk to work for a few weeks until it got warmer,” McConnell said. “I decided I wanted to live in a warmer climate.”
He was hired as the head coach at Tombstone High School over the phone, without ever visiting the Town Too Tough To Die. More happenstance: A year later, he was about to interview for the coaching job at Eloy High School; the same day, he was contacted by Rincon High School.
Would he be interested in coaching the Rangers’ freshman team?
“I never met anyone who didn’t like Dick,” said Bob Vielliedent, McConnell’s longtime assistant at Sahuaro. “He was such a good communicator; the kids loved him and so did the parents and the faculty. He was never a coach who yelled or demeaned the kids. He was one in a million.”
Where are they now? McConnell and his wife, Clarine, are retired and live in Tucson. They operated a real estate business until retirement.
His son, Rick McConnell, has won more than 600 games as basketball coach at Mesa Dobson High School and was an All-State shortstop for Sahuaro’s 1974 state champions.
How they did it: When the ’70 Sahuaro team stunned No. 1-ranked Phoenix Union in the state semifinals, McConnell was unafraid. He employed a pressing defense that opposing coaches said wouldn’t work against a team led by future ASU and NBA standout Rudy White.
“Coach told us, ‘We’re going to run with these guys; we’re going to press these guys,’ ” said Sahuaro guard Jim Ferguson, later a two-time state title coach at Santa Rita. “I don’t think anyone had dared to press them all year. But our press killed them.”
Photo: Sahuaro High School basketball coach Dick McConnell holds the state championship trophy as his team goes crazy around him after winning the state championship game on Feb. 17, 2001. The Cougars won 62-55. Photo by Benjie Sanders / Arizona Daily Star
