The Wolfpacker: An Independent Magazine Covering NC State Sports
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48 ■ THE WOLFPACKER PACK PAST Coaching Tumult Marked The Early Years Of Varsity Basketball At NC State BY TIM PEELER T he earliest coaching history of NC State basketball is both complicated and a little fuzzy, so much so that the first two dozen years are not chronicled cor- rectly in what is now canon for a hand- me-down record book. The game germinated slowly on a cam- pus that had just three varsity sports: football, baseball and track and field. From its first season in 1911 until ex- perienced basketball player and instruc- tor Gus Tebell was hired for the 1924-25 season, basketball was played without an on-campus gymnasium with rosters populated by football and baseball play- ers looking to occupy their time between their main sports. In the first 14 years of the program, there were nine different leaders of the program, though not all were labeled as "coach." Until 1925, no leader served for more than two consecutive seasons. Those who were paid were either doing other jobs within the athletics department or were instructors at the college. One player-coach, Nathan "Piggy" Hargrove, was so upset about being out- scored 142-36 in three consecutive losses that he walked away from his tri-duties as player, coach and student. (Hargrove is incorrectly listed as NC State's first basketball coach for the two-game 1911 season; he didn't serve as coach until part of the 1912-13 season, all of which was properly chronicled in author Doug Herakovich's "Pack Pride: An Illustrated History of N.C. State Basketball.") The record book is accurate, however, in that most early coaches were volun- teers, be they enrolled students, faculty or staff members. That's similar to the first football coach in school history, Raleigh-born Perrin Busbee, who was not only a stu- dent when he coached the first game in the history of the North Carolina School of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in the spring of 1892, he was a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, on loan solely so he could coach the new program against his high school alma mater, the Raleigh Male Academy. Football didn't have a paid coach until 1905. Basketball was a little different and a little later. The sport was introduced on campus in 1908 by the school's general secretary of the Young Men's Christian Association, John W. Bergthold, a Min- nesota native who learned the game while attending and working at similar land-grant universities in the Midwest. Bergthold came to A&M (later named NC State) to take on a massive hazing scandal on campus for president George Tayloe Winston by introducing other on-campus activities to keep rowdy students occupied and to help raise money for an on-campus YMCA build- ing financed by John D. Rockefeller. In 1909, Bergthold organized five basketball teams among the 470 or so students then enrolled at A&M, one each for the senior, junior, sophomore and freshman classes and one for the E.V. "Buck" Freeman (front row, left) was the coach when NC State won its first varsity basketball game, a 19-18 decision over Wake Forest in 1911. PHOTO COURTESY NC STATE ATHLETICS