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Roger
Underwood
Yakima Herald-Republic

E-mail Roger Underwood about this column

He is 53, now, and these days he teaches a game he once excelled at.

But even though he was a prominent part of Class 1A state tournament history 33 years ago, Darrell Winters remembers as if it were yesterday.

“Thirty-eight to thirty-five,” he said, smiling at the score of his team’s 1967 blockbuster upset of Ilwaco in Tacoma’s University of Puget Sound Fieldhouse. ”That was the highlight of my playing days.”

It would have been a highlight for most players.

Winters’ Cougars were prohibitive underdogs in their quarterfinal matchup against the op-ranked Fishermen, a racehorse team that had electrified first-day tourney-goers with a 103-77 blitz of Cheney. White Swan, with senior guard Winters scoring nine points, had opened the tournament with a 56-46 defeat of Woodland.

“Everybody expected Ilwaco to play Prosser for the championship,” Winters said Wednesday in the Yakima Valley SunDome, where he was assisting White Swan head coach Ray Funk. “But we had other ideas.”

And Dean Lundblad, the Cougars’ heady coach, had a master plan.

Slow the tempo. Control the action. Make Ilwaco play White Swan’s patient, patterned game and maybe, just maybe, the Fishermen might become rattled and, in the process, beatable.

“We were only supposed to take certain shots,” Winters recalled. “In fact, only a few of us were supposed to shoot at all.”

And with a captivated near-capacity crowd watching, the Cougars followed their coach’s game plan to the letter, staging one of the most shocking upsets in tournament history.

“I still hear about it,” says Funk, who played for White Swan in the 1980s. “As athletic director I’d call someplace like Blaine and talk to someone about scheduling a softball game. And they’d say, ‘You’re from White Swan? Oh yeah, you’re the team that upset Ilwaco back in ’67.”

Here’s why.

The Cougars’ starting five that season consisted of Winters, Pat Shellenberger, Chuck Vivette, Warren Craig and Gail Berry. Shellenberger was White Swan’s big man at 6-foot-5 and Frank Mesplie was the sixth man.

No one else played against Ilwaco.

Each player knew, accepted and thrived in his role in Lundblad’s precise schemes. And all knew their only real hope against Ilwaco was to radically reduce the game’s pace.

There were howls of protest from the Fishermen faithful, according to Jack Richards’ account in the Yakima Morning Herald, but the Cougars stuck to their plan. Shellenberger, for example, took (and made) the game’s first shot with 4:56 gone in the first quarter.

“We figured they might get a little frustrated,” Winters said. “And as the game went on, you could see that happening. They had a really good player, a kid named Phil Oman. He was at the foul line, shot a free throw and he didn’t even touch the rim.

“I looked in his eyes and I knew they were in trouble.”

Even though Ilwaco led 29-24 entering the fourth quarter. But that’s when Winters, one of White Swan’s best clutch players, came through.

With the Cougars down 33-29, Winters made three foul shots and then hit a 10-foot jumper for a 34-33 White Swan lead.

Vivette, another cool customer, made four free throws in the final six seconds to ice it.

Winters, with 13 points, shared game scoring honors with Oman. No one else hit double figures.

And here’s another number which testifies as to the Cougars’ patience and poise. They took only 18 shots, but made 12.

“Our coach was really good at figuring out what would work against a specific team,” Winters said of Lundblad, who left White Swan after that season to coach in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. “And that’s probably the only thing we could have done that would have worked against Ilwaco. They weren’t used to scoring in the 30s. And they weren’t happy about it.”

The Cougars, of course, were elated. And it wasn’t even their last hurrah.

White Swan would advance to the championship game, but a tall and talented Prosser team proved the Cougs’ demise, 72-50.

Winters, who runs a cattle ranch near town and teaches physical education and weight training at the high school, later became a football teammate of Prosser’s Bucky Bruns at Yakima Valley College.

Still, being No. 2 in 1967 wasn’t all that bad.

Especially considering the monster upset it took to get there.

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