Packers 1960 basketball team getting back together
Published 10:25 pm Tuesday, March 23, 2010
The 1960 Austin boys basketball team will get one more chance to take the court with the Edgerton team that beat them in the state title game 50 years ago.
The two teams will take place in an honorary jump ball before this Saturday evening’s Class ‘AAAA’ title game at Target Center in Minneapolis and 14 representatives from each team will be honored in a halftime ceremony.
Austin will also hold its own celebration for the 1960 Packers when the squad will meet up for a reunion at George’s Pizza at 5 p.m. Friday night.
When the teams met 50 years ago, Austin may had looked like the favorites coming in. The Packers took third in the state in 1959, won the state title in 1958, and Edgerton was a town of around 1,000.
However, Edgerton’s balanced attack was enough to upend the Packers 72-61 in front of just over 19,000 fans in Williams Arena.
Terry Brown, a starting guard on that Austin team, said that Edgerton, which finished 27-0 overall, was not an underdog.
“We ran into a team that worked harder than us and they really did a good job,” he said. They did everything right and I don’t know if we could’ve beaten them.”
Brown said he is currently reading a book on Edgerton’s team to see what made them so great. He also thinks Austin should focus on the fact that it made three deep playoff runs in three years.
“We felt pretty good about ourselves and what we’d accomplished,” he said.
Brown said that players from the 1958 and 1959 Austin teams, as well as players from Pacelli are also being invited to the Friday night celebration at George’s.
As for the 1960 team, Brown, who now lives in Rochester, is expecting all but one former manager to make the trip to Austin.
Besides being honored at halftime, the 1960 team will be given special passes for all four days of the tournament and tickets for a suite during all the Saturday Championship games, which begin at 2 p.m.