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This is Part 5 of the Quintessential D3 Moment series. While researching their book Pipeline to the Pros: How D3, Small-College Nobodies Rose to Rule the NBA, authors Ben Kaplan and Danny Parkins asked some of the most accomplished former D3 hoopers for their best “love of the game” moment from their college days. The book is available for pre-sale and you can sign up for Ben's newsletter here.

By Ben Kaplan

If not for a few COVID-related tournament cancellations, last weekend would’ve marked the culmination of the 50th NCAA Division III men’s basketball tournament. Fifty years, in the grand scheme of US academia, isn’t much. We are, after all, talking about old colleges; the four men’s Final Four teams represented schools founded in either the 18th or 19th century.

Even the country’s newest “major” pro league - the NBA, born in 1946 - is old enough to be D3’s father, so to speak. This presented a dilemma when we set out to write Pipeline to the Pros - what should we do about the men who had impactful NBA coaching and management careers, but happened to play their small-college basketball before Division III was founded?

• Quintessential D3 Moment series introduction
• Part 1: D3's coaching wunderkinds
• Part 2: Permission to be great
• Part 3: Basketball is basketball
• Part 4: The uneven awards of almost making it
• Sign up for the Kap Space newsletter

Ultimately, we decided to gather everyone who suited up for a school that eventually joined Division III (as of 2020, when we began our research) under the D3 umbrella. Even if they competed in the NAIA, or in the NCAA when it was a division-less Pangea, or in the era when schools could belong to both the NAIA and the NCAA, they’re still one of us. Sure, they may have gone on to run the Lakers, or found the Mavericks, or invent the dunk contest. But their work ethic, humility, well-roundedness, and competitive spirit were pure D3.

Plus, it provided an opportunity for us to learn more about the fascinating history of small-college athletics in the pre-D3 era. Some colleges fielded teams that were nothing more than a glorified intramural squad. Then there were the serious programs, like the mighty Pipers of Hamline College. Hamline traveled the country, even playing on the hallowed ground of Madison Square Garden. They took on everyone from Stanford, DePaul, Vanderbilt, and Gonzaga.

The very first general manager of the Minneapolis Lakers, Max Winter, was a Hamline basketball alum. When the team was looking to hire their inaugural coach, they asked the best local mentor they knew - Hamline’s Joe Hutton. Hutton turned them down. It’s easy to look back and scoff at Hutton’s decision to stay at a small college rather than coach the Lakers, but it was a different time. Back then, Hamline was the stable job and the pros were the big risk. The Lakers found their first coach at a different Minnesota small college, hiring John Kundla, who had recently started working at St. Thomas.

Kundla won six pro championships and earned a spot in the Hall of Fame. Hutton did okay for himself, too. In 1957, his program had won 18 MIAC conference championships in 26 years. Hamline produced seven NBA players, including Hutton’s son, Joe Jr., and Hall of Fame Laker Vern Mikkelsen. Basketball fans from coast-to-coast knew all about Hutton and his Hamline Pipers. And therein lay the problem. During the mid-to-late 1950s, Hamline University president Paul Henry Giddens concluded that the college was putting too much of an emphasis on athletics. Coach Hutton was the face of the school, and, to an educator like Giddens, that just wasn’t right.

"Commercialism and professionalization of intercollegiate athletics poses serious problems for all colleges," he wrote. "As I see the future of intercollegiate athletics, the small college has about three choices: A. It can endeavor to stay in the race, bid higher and higher for good athletes, and sacrifice everything else to this one objective. B. It can disassociate itself with those colleges which pursue a policy as indicated directly above. C. If the second choice is not possible, it can drop intercollegiate athletics altogether and concentrate upon having a strong intramural athletic program."

Giddens eventually won the power struggle. Joe Hutton retired in 1965 after his 35th year as head coach. The college, along with many other small schools, fully committed to Giddens’ “Option B” and disassociated itself from the athletic arm’s race taking place at big universities. The NCAA’s formation of Division III was, in many ways, a larger scale action towards Giddens’ “Option B.” But the conflict between athletics and academics, of course, never fully went away.

In the period after Joe Hutton’s retirement, but before the birth of Divisions I, II, and III, small-college athletes often found themselves in a world that straddled Giddens’ “Option A,” with its highly competitive sports, and his “Option C,” which could be confused for intramurals.

One such athlete was Mike Fratello, who, before his decorated career as an NBA coach and broadcaster, attended Montclair State University in the late-1960s. As a freshman, Fratello played football, basketball, and baseball. He still remembers the day he received his first college football uniform…not exactly the nicest threads.

"They had to have worn those back in the Civil War days," Fratello says, "because they were the oldest, most beat-up uniforms you could’ve worn. But that’s what the freshman got."

That spring he decided to drop his weakest sport, basketball, in order to keep up with his studies. He still stayed connected to the game, spending summers working camps and playing in a league run by a local high school coach named Hubie Brown. (My co-author Danny interviewed Brown, the key connection who helped Fratello climb the ranks all the way to the NBA, for nearly three hours for the book. His stories were remarkable.)

Fratello’s quintessential small college moment came during the spring of his junior year. For the first time, Montclair State’s football program decided to hold spring practices. Unfortunately, they also happened to be renovating their football field. So they practiced in Brookdale Park, a public green space in nearby Bloomfield, New Jersey.

"You can imagine these 85-year-olds were out there going for their walk, and here are these 40 guys coming out with shoulder pads and helmets,” Fratello says. He imagines the elderly walkers were asking their companions, “What are these guys doing here today? I wonder why they’re hitting each other?”

Those familiar beats - the shoddy facilities and gear that never dampened the love of the game - were one aspect of the pre-D3 world. Then there were the blurred lines between divisions, and how that opened up the opportunity for a small-college guy to have a shot against a future pro. Before his time as Sacramento Kings head coach and Golden State Warriors general manager, Garry St. Jean played basketball at Springfield College. An injury cut his career short, but not before a memorable game against Holy Cross, a future D1 school with a rich basketball history.

Soon-to-be Boston Celtics guard Kevin Stacom starred for Holy Cross, alongside a formidable front-line that dwarfed St. Jean and his Springfield teammates. But Springfield managed to win the game. “It was just like, ‘we and us’ was better than ‘I and me,’” St. Jean says.

From St. Jean and Fratello to guys like Lou Mohs, Bill Fitch, Norm Sonju, and Carl Scheer, the pre-D3 small-college alums were a fascinating bunch to read about and, in the case of those still with us, to interview. Much in the same way the pre-D3 world shaped the Division III we know and love today, guys like Fratello and St. Jean laid the groundwork necessary for more recent D3 alums to find a home in the NBA. If you check out the book, we hope you enjoy learning about their journeys and the small-college experience in that era as much as we did.