50 After 50: No. 7 Suns win 57 out of 58 games during two-year stretch, bring home first state trophy

The Illinois High School Association created a second class for boys basketball for the 1971-72 school year. The 2020-21 season would have been the 50th year of the boys basketball small-school tournament. Muddy River Sports is celebrating 50 years of small-school boys basketball by ranking the 50 best teams in Adams, Brown, Pike and Hancock counties since 1972.

No. 7 — Southeastern 1991-92

AUGUSTA, Ill. — Jason Marlow was coaching his daughter’s junior high school basketball team about five years ago and wanted to teach the girls a couple of inbounds plays his team used when he played at Southeastern High School during the early 1990s.

He remembered the first option on the plays, but he couldn’t remember the second and third options. He knew where to look to get the answers.

It would not be easy to watch, however.

“I had to watch the Normal U-High game (in the semifinals of the 1992 Class A state tournament),” Marlow remembered. “It only took me about 25 years to watch it, and it’s still painful. I think my dad has watched it a thousand times. Unfortunately for us, the score is still the same every time he watches it.”

The loss was the first blemish in what had been a perfect 1991-92 season.

Expectations for Southeastern were high. Four of the top six players — Jason Marlow, Jason Ippensen, Brad Gooding and Randy Long — returned from a 27-3 team that won 26 consecutive games before losing to eventual Class A state champion Pittsfield in the super-sectional at Macomb.

“(The loss to Pittsfield) gave us a better understanding of what it took to get over that next hump for that next level,” Marlow said. “It really opened our eyes to what could be a decent senior year.”

Mike Fray coached the Suns. He had coached at Southeastern for seven years during the 1970s, then returned to the school to serve as the high school principal. However, he stepped in as the coach for the 1988-89 season after Dave Barr died in a car-train crash in Hancock County on June 13, 1988.

Southeastern then brought in Bryan Brickner, a walk-on practice player from the University of Illinois basketball team, to join the staff. However, he coached the sophomore team for one season and the varsity team for one season before leaving in May 1990 to attend graduate school.

“We weren’t going to be very good (when Brickner arrived), so I told (Superintendent) Terry Robertson, ‘Let me help coach him,’” Fray said. “We didn’t have a losing season either year (Brickner was there), and he played that class of really talented sophomores. He was really getting ready to take that bunch somewhere.

“Then he came into the office one day, and I’ll never forget it. He said, ‘What are you guys going to do to me if I tell you I’m not coming back?’ I immediately said, ‘Probably kill you.’ It didn’t scare him, because he went ahead and left. Terry knew we were going to be pretty good, and he said, ‘You’re going to have to do it again.’”

The Suns won 10 games before Christmas, with nine of them by a margin of 16 points or more. Pittsfield was the first game in January, and Southeastern whipped the defending state champions 72-51 in Augusta. Marlow led the Suns with 29 points.

“Coach Fray wasn’t about to let us walk through the gym with a head so big it wouldn’t fit through the door. We didn’t talk a lot about a perfect record,” Marlow said. “We were probably aware of it. Clearly there was not the social media presence that there is now. We didn’t have to worry about all the TikTok hype and all the Facebook hype. We read the newspaper and listened to the radio. Fray kept us pretty grounded.”

After victories over Industry and Liberty, the Suns rolled through the Hancock County Tournament to go to 16-0. Southeastern beat Plymouth and Nauvoo-Colusa, then made 33 of 50 free throws in a 74-55 victory over Hamilton in the title game. Marlow led the Suns with 24 points. 

The Suns then rattled off 10 more victories to finish the regular season with a 26-0 record. Four players were averaging in double figures — Marlow (16.8 ppg), Ippensen (15.6 ppg, 11.6 rebounds per game), Gooding (13 ppg) and Long (11.8 ppg). Southeastern was averaging 75 points per game while allowing just 50.

“We played two defenses,” Fray said. “We played a 1-3-1 zone. Sometimes we trapped out of it, but not all the time. We also played a matchup triangle. We guarded your guards man-to-man with Marlow and Gooding. If you solved our 1-3-1 couple of times, then we go to our 55 and be in the matchup. 

“Ippensen was a ton on the front of the 1-3-1. He was so intimidating. People would almost give him the ball because he scared the hell out of them. He also was our leading rebounder because he never screened anybody out. He always went to the ball when it was shot.”

Southeastern also made more free throws (448 out of 676) than its opponents shot (207 out of 354). 

By the time the Suns played their first game in the Beardstown Regional, the final regular season Class A state poll ranked them No. 1. The Suns started with a 65-50 victory over Rushville, then defeated Brown County 75-58 in the regional title game. Marlow led the way with 29 points.

Marlow had 28 in a physical 71-64 victory over Bushnell-Prairie City in the semifinals of the sectional in Bushnell. The Suns then made 13 of 14 free throws in the final 1:38 of the sectional championship in a 66-55 victory over Hamilton. Marlow scored 27 in that game.

A matchup with North Greene, ranked No. 1 in the state poll for most of the season, didn’t materialize in the super-sectional at Macomb. Virden shocked the Spartans in the sectional final at Petersburg, but the Bulldogs were no match for Southeastern in a 77-50 decision. After 24 years on the bench, Fray had finally guided a team to Champaign.

“We kind of walked into Western Hall having been there before. We were a little bit more prepared,” Marlow said. “That was probably the best game we played all year. Everything went well for us that night.

“As I look back now as a 47-year-old, I certainly didn’t enjoy what we did enough. I probably took for granted the fact that we had a good team, got to play in front of a full house and the following of the entire community. You really look back on that and the atmosphere. It wasn’t just home games. It was every away game as well.”

Southeastern turned the ball over six times on its first seven possessions in a quarterfinal game against Fairfield, but Marlow led the way with 25 points in a 59-44 victory.

The dream for a state championship ended the next day. Southeastern and Normal University High were tied at 43 with 6:22 left to play. However, the Suns missed their next 11 shots. The Pioneers scored 13 straight points to post a 63-50 victory in the semifinals.

Southeastern followed up with a 76-69 loss in the third-place game to Benton. JoJo Johnson, who had scored 79 points in the first two games at Assembly Hall, but the Suns limited him to 20 points. However, Rangers center Brian Holman — who belonged to a church that prevented him from participating in recreational activities from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday — finished with 22 points and 15 rebounds.

“(Assistant coach) Todd (Fox, now Southeastern’s superintendent) always said if we had a day to prepare, we probably could have beaten U-High,” Fray said. “Who knows? We didn’t, and they were pretty good team. They were big. Because of the way we were, we had to prepare for whoever we were going to play.”

“I’m not going to say I think about (the final day of the state tournament) every day of my life,” Marlow said. “I’ve been blessed with a good job, a great wife, a good family and things of that nature. But there is not a basketball season that goes by that I do not think about that last Saturday in mid-March. That Saturday morning game when we played U-High, I am convinced that if we played them 100 times, it would be 50 to 50. The teams were evenly matched, and I really believe it could have gone either way.

“My biggest regret of high school sports is we lost that third-place game that night. We should have won that game. No discredit to Benton. They had a good team. That’s a game that we would have won, no doubt in my mind, nine times out of 10. However, we had just suffered our first loss, and we weren’t mentally tough enough to overcome that. If I had one thing to do all over again, if you make me pick between the two, I would have said I want to play that third-place game again.”

Those two losses ended a remarkable two-year stretch during which Southeastern won 26 games in a row before losing to Pittsfield in the 1991 super-sectional, then winning 32 consecutive games before the doubleheader loss at the state tournament.

“Who knows what chemistry is, but the chemistry of the ’92 team was probably the best I’ve ever had,” Fray said. “The ’92 team, just they refused to lose. 

“It was good to get to go over (to Champaign) and be part of that, especially with (assistant coach Dave) Swisegood. You can’t put words to it. I know how hard we worked. When you’re done with it, sometimes you’re relieved.”

Marlow lives in Burlington, Iowa, where he’s worked for 26 years as a trooper for the Iowa State Highway Patrol.