Steve Honderd (center) enjoys another victory with his Calvin College teammates during the Knights' 1992 national championship season. Calvin athletics photo

By Gordon Mann
D3hoops.com

Steve Honderd’s journey to basketball greatness at Calvin College is a compelling case for predestination.

Years before Steve was born, his father Ralph enrolled as an undergraduate student at the Christian university named after 16th-century Protestant theologian John Calvin. Ralph ran track and played basketball for the Knights and excelled at both. In 1961, he was a forward on Calvin's undefeated basketball team and then he won the conference title in the shot put later that spring. After earning his master's degree, Ralph returned to Grand Rapids and joined Calvin as an athletic coach and a professor in the Kinesiology department.

Initially hired as Calvin's interim men's soccer coach, Ralph eventually coached track and field and men's basketball while raising his son Steve and daughters Kris and Karyn in Grand Rapids. A few blocks from the Honderds lived James Timmer, whose father was Ralph’s teammate on the 1961 basketball team. 

Timmer, who is three years older than Steve, remembers watching him grow from a slim middle school student into a dominant post player at Grand Rapids Christian High school, where they shared the court for one year.

After high school, Timmer followed in his father’s footsteps and enrolled at Calvin, where Steve would come to watch Knights’ basketball games and play during open gym. “He was one of the big reasons I went to Calvin,” Honderd says of Timmer. “I grew up watching him play.” Honderd also decided to follow in his father's footsteps and enrolled at Calvin where his father had risen to the position of the college's athletic director.

When Jim Timmer is asked about his friend Steve Honderd, he calls back to Steve’s first day of practice as a Calvin College freshman.

“My senior year [at Calvin], Bill Sall and I were the captains of that [basketball] team. We were pretty good. Sall was coming back as the MVP. We knew Steve was really good. The first day of practice, we had starters divided playing against the subs. Steve was on the reserves that first practice, and that was his last day with them. He moved to the starters after that.”

Adding a freshman to the starting lineup of a championship-caliber team was very unusual, especially in the early 90s when first-year students ordinarily played junior varsity at an established program like Calvin. But Honderd was far from ordinary and, as the son of a basketball coach, he understood five-man open motion offense employed by Calvin coach Ed Douma.

So, Honderd plugged into an experienced lineup and became an immediate scoring threat, leading the team in scoring with 18.9 points per game. Honderd was not only potent, but also ultra-efficient, as he also led the team in field goal percentage (61.0 percent) and free throwing percentage (80.2 percent).

Asked about his stellar freshman season, Honderd is very quick to share credit.

“It was a big transition. I was fortunate that we had a strong upper class at that time – Jim, Bill, Jerry Visscher. We had great leadership, off the court and on it. They bailed me out a lot of times, more than I can even count.”

Timmer provides a different perspective on his friend’s contribution.

“I was not surprised at his jump into the starting lineup. Steve will probably tell you he was a role player his first year. But that’s not true. He was exactly what we needed my first year. Our individual scoring averages went down, but we were really happy to play with him.”

That season, Calvin went 28-3 and advanced to the program's first national semifinal by beating top-ranked Wittenberg in their gym, 63-59. The Knights lost to DePauw in the national semifinals, despite a big scoring night from Honderd, but neither that game or the win over Wittenberg is the game most fondly remembered by Calvin fans from that season. The most prominent memory from the 1990-91 season was a series of wins over Hope College, another small Michigan college that is inextricably linked to any discussion of Calvin College basketball. 

The Rivalry

The roots of Calvin College's rivalry with Hope College trace back to the colleges’ geographic proximity and their religious differences. Hope, which is located about 30 miles from Calvin, is affiliated with the Reformed Church in America and Calvin with the Christian Reformed Church, which split off from the former in the mid-1800s.

The Calvin/Hope rivalry (or, if you prefer, the Hope/Calvin rivalry) captures all that is good about college sports.

It has a long history. The schools first played each other in men’s basketball in 1920 and they’ve met 215 more times over the last 105 years, most recently when Calvin beat Hope 62-59 in last season’s MIAA tournament title game.

The rivalry is astonishingly even. Hope leads the all-time series 111-105 but the combined scoring differential is just seven points.

It is widely recognized as the best rivalry in Division III basketball and one of the best at any level of college athletics. It has been chronicled by D3hoops.com for more than a quarter-century, as well as ESPN, the New York Times, and, of course, the colleges themselves. The schools refer to their rivalry as simply The Rivalry, and most Division III basketball fans don’t need any further qualifier to understand which schools are involved, even if they have never been to Western Michigan.

And the Rivalry runs deep.

So deep that Timmer, who is now Calvin’s AD, jokes that he will not allow any orange-and-blue sports memorabilia in his house. Even his Detroit Tigers fandom is subject to this rule, and he only wears Tigers’ caps without orange. The Rivalry is so meaningful to its participants that, when Ralph Honderd passed away in 2022, his obituary cited his perfect 15-0 record as a basketball coach against Hope among his life achievements.

But the Rivalry is usually not bitter. It often reflects the modesty and grace that defines many of its most storied participants.

Former Calvin head coach Kevin Vande Streek told ESPN in 2007, “Hey, I want to beat Hope. But I have a lot of respect for what they're doing. When we're out recruiting, [the coaches of both schools] sit together. We see each other at clinics and we recruit a lot of the same players. The players are usually high school teammates. They stand up in each other's weddings, play together on summer league teams.”

Honderd knew about the Rivalry long before he played in it. His earliest memory of a Calvin College athletic event is not surprisingly a Calvin-Hope basketball game. But playing in the Rivalry gave him a deeper appreciation for it.

Late in his first game against Hope, Calvin clung to a 77-76 lead in the closing moments but Hope had the ball.

“Going back to my freshman season, I didn’t know what to expect when we played them in the Civic Center,” Hondred says. “It got so loud at the end of the game, you couldn’t hear the buzzer. They ended up hitting a layup, but it didn’t count.”

The next season, when Honderd was a sophomore, Hope beat Calvin in the teams' first two meetings, but the Knights got their revenge in the NCAA Tournament when they once again defeated the Flying Dutch, this time 89-84 in overtime. Calvin’s 1991 run finished one game shy of the national semifinals, but Honderd’s evolution continued. He once again led the Knights in scoring, field goal percentage and free throw percentage. He also led the team in rebounding with his 7.1 rebounds per game, doubling that of Calvin's next best rebounder.

Timmer watched Honderd's development that season from the sidelines since he was a student assistant coach on Douma's staff.

“Steve's thing, all the way from about 10th grade on, was that he was the most fundamentally sound offensive post player. You combine that with an uncanny touch and his footwork,” Timmer recalls. “He was the most consistent. Most consistent in practice and most consistent in the game.”

Honderd once again deflects credit to others, this time to his father and Bill Sall, who was a senior captain in Honderd's freshman season and is now the Knights' head men's basketball coach.

“A lot of that [success] was my father was a coach. We’d spend a lot of time in the driveway, working on different moves. It doesn’t just come naturally. You’d have to work on your moves.  He’d say, ‘you gotta do this like Bill Sall.’”

Predestination fulfilled

Calvin athletics photo

The Knights hit their full stride in Honderd’s junior season. Calvin swept Hope 3-0 and ended the Flying Dutch’s season in the NCAA Tournament for the third consecutive season, this time with a 91-88 win in front of 4,500 fans. The Knights edged Gustavus Adolphus, 69-68, in the next round and then crushed Otterbein (88-67) and Jersey City State (81-40) to reach the national championship game.

Calvin finished the title journey with a 62-49 win over Rochester for the program's first national championship, and Honderd finished his outstanding junior season by scoring 25 points and grabbing eight rebounds, earning him Tournament Most Outstanding Player honors. At the end of the season, Honderd was once again the Knights’ leading scorer, rebounder and shooter, including a 59-percent showing from three (10-for-17) after attempting three triples total in his first two seasons.

When asked about that season, Honderd defers credit to the “loaded” freshman class that helped put Calvin over the top, and head coach Douma. “Coach Douma was a great coach. I’m thankful to have played for him. He was a great basketball mind. I always felt, no matter whom we played against, he put us in a position to win.”

Honderd remembers his final season at Calvin fondly, including a season-opening win at Alaska-Fairbanks and a champion-vs.-champion game against 1992 NAIA Division I title winner Oklahoma City. Calvin won both matchups with Hope and then topped Kalamazoo for the MIAA title. Honderd set a school record with 61 points on 20-for-28 shooting from the field and 17 -for-21 from the foul line in the Knights’ 96-90 win over the Hornets. Asked about the game, which is mostly available on YouTube today, Honderd demurs.

“Every position was key. Kalamazoo was a tough, tough team. I don’t remember all the scoring. I just remember it being a battle.”

Calvin’s title defense and Honderd's college basketball career ended with a loss to eventual national champion Ohio Northern in the Elite 8, but the Knights finished as one of the final eight teams each of Honderd's four seasons. He was named the NABC Division III Player of the Year, and he once again led the team in scoring, rebounding and field goal percentage. In his final form, Honderd also led the team in three-point shooting, going 32-for-74 from behind the arc. For his career, Honderd started 119 of 120 games, averaged 20.7 points and shot 62.8 percent from the field, both of which remain Calvin College records.

This October, Honderd will add one more accolade to his storied career when he is inducted into the Small College Basketball Hall of Fame. He is one of three 2025 inductees who excelled at the Division III level, along with Dan McCarrell who won three national championships at North Park, and Joey Flannery who led Babson to the 2017 national title.

After graduating from Calvin, Honderd played in Europe and then with Athletes in Action. He has settled into a career in finance and now lives in Holland, close to Hope’s campus. “I have people who come up to me and say, ‘I don’t think I like you very much.’”

Asked about his greatest achievement, Honderd again chooses to share the spotlight and recognize the contributions of others.

“It’s winning the national championship. The national championship team is spread out around the country, but we still stay pretty close. That’s part of doing something special together.”

Honderd is unfailingly modest, to the point of almost being shy, and he’s more comfortable talking about the accomplishments of others than his own. He was a winner, a champion, and the consummate teammate. Just ask his former high school and college teammate Jim Timmer.

“I don’t think you could find a teammate in those four years that would say, ‘Man, I hated playing with Steve Honderd.’ I don’t think you can find one.”

1992 Division III men's basketball national champions, Calvin College. Steve Honderd (No. 50) kneels third from the left. Photo courtesy of Calvin College athletics