Department Spotlight: Kansas hosts national basketball tournament
The Hutchinson Sports Arena in Kansas, home of the National Junior College Athletic Association Division 1 men’s basketball championship tournament since 1949. Clay Lomneth/The American Legion

Department Spotlight: Kansas hosts national basketball tournament

Editor’s note: This is a weekly series of Department Spotlight stories featuring unique programs and initiatives of departments throughout The American Legion. Department adjutants are invited to recommend subjects for their departments by emailing magazine@legion.org.

Newly minted veterans of World War II wanted sports, and The American Legion of Kansas wanted the young veterans to join the organization. American Legion Baseball had successfully taken root as a youth program by the late 1920s across the state and the country, but when the GIs of the Second World War came home, it was time for something new, and Kansas was all in for hoops. The Legion responded.

In the 1945-46 season, according to the 1968 book “The History of The American Legion in Kansas” by Richard Loosbrock, “there were at least 48 post basketball teams participating in competition throughout the Sunflower State.” Harry B. Dorst Post 24 in McPherson, Kan., went on to win the 1949 national American Legion Basketball tournament.

In the years that followed, however, Loosbrock wrote, “As the Legionnaires became older, and as more and more were burdened with family responsibilities, time was running out on basketball as a Legion activity.”

As a sport for Legionnaires to play, basketball may have been short-lived – dying out as a national competition in the early 1950s – but in Kansas, the Legion’s involvement was just tipping off.

Hutchinson, Kan., has been the home of the National Junior College Athletic Association Division 1 men’s basketball championship tournament since 1949. And that’s not going to change anytime soon. The American Legion and the NJCAA signed a new 25-year agreement in February 2016 to continue a relationship that has connected some of America’s top basketball players and coaches with the nation’s largest veterans organization, specifically Post 68 in Hutchinson.

“We run it for the NJCAA – we literally run it,” says Larry R. Collins, a Lysle Rishel Post 68 member and arena coordinator for the annual tournament; he has been volunteering to help put on the event for the last 45 years. “There’s so much that goes into this tournament. It’s not just a throw-together situation. It all comes together.”

Post 68 – which summons an army of more than 200 local American Legion Family members, all serving on various committees, every March to coordinate the event – will continue to do so after a local sales tax was passed to complete a nearly $30 million overhaul of the Hutchinson Sports Arena. The project is now under construction and will be done in time for the 2017 tourney.

“Hopefully, it will be paid for in nine or 10 years,” says Post 68 member, longtime tournament volunteer and American Legion National Executive Committee member David Warnken. “And it will be a great asset to the community, something we’re really looking forward to.”

The Hutchinson Sports Arena opened in 1952, three years after the community landed the tournament with backing from the local Legion post and a promise of volunteer support for nearly every aspect of the event, from security to parking to clock keeping and team support. The tournament recently expanded from 16 to 24 teams in a single-elimination format.

Some of basketball’s greats have passed through Hutchinson over the years, ranging from 7-foot-2 future National Basketball Association Hall of Famer Artis Gilmore of Gardner-Webb to the 5-foot-6 phenomenon Spud Webb from Midland, Texas. Top coaches, from Bob Knight to Cotton Fitzsimmons to Larry Brown and P.J. Carlesimo, have also come through Hutchinson, scouting players for four-year colleges and NBA teams.

“We refer to it as the tournament,” says Post 68 member and tournament director Joe O’Sullivan. “For people locally, when you use those words, they know what you’re talking about. This tournament is the flagship of National Junior College Athletic Association events.”

While Hutchinson, about an hour’s drive west from Wichita, built a great reputation as the host city for the tournament – commonly filling the 7,000 seats in the arena thanks largely to vigorous ticket sales efforts from Post 68 – the agreement was renewable every three years. In order to secure the tournament for the long term, local voters in 2015 passed the sales tax measure – about one-third of one cent – with nearly 75 percent of ballots in favor, to make the upgrades to the center, which included:

  • Compliance with Americans with Disabilities Act provisions, including new and improved seating, railing and wheelchair accessibility
  • Three new practice basketball courts with expanded public access
  • Rebuilt restroom facilities
  • Four new dressing rooms
  • Air conditioning; even though the tournament is played in March, it can get hot that time of year in central Kansas, and improved circulation makes it more of a year-round facility for local activities
  • New storage areas
  • New administrative offices for Hutchinson Community College, which plays its home games in the arena

Post 68 generates a substantial portion of its annual revenue from sales of advertising, programs and souvenirs at the tournament. It also receives payment from the NJCAA to run the event. “The tournament is one of the major funding sources for the post,” Post 68 Commander David Griffin says. “If it weren’t for the people putting this on and the income from the tournament, this post would not be what it is. It takes a lot of money to operate this post, and the income from the tournament certainly helps.”

On the Thursday of tournament week each year, Post 68 serves up an all-you-can-eat pancake breakfast for $5 a person. When the breakfast was introduced in the 1980s, about 150 partook, with funds going to Hutchinson Community College scholarships. Since then, the annual breakfast has grown to feed more than 1,200 a year, and the number of scholarships supported from it has increased from two to five.

The tournament generates an estimated $1.3 million in economic impact for the community each year. “They’re filling up all the rooms,” says Collins, whose son and grandson, both Sons of The American Legion members, also volunteer to work the tournament. “They’re eating. They’re buying clothes. They’re buying souvenirs. Every food place in town is jam packed.”

Warnken has watched the tournament and the Legion’s role in it evolve since he went to the first grand opening of the sports arena – built for $1 million at the time – as a young boy. “I remember the grand opening,” he says. “The streets were still dirt. It was kind of out in the middle of a field. It hadn’t developed that much around the arena. It was muddy, so they actually had to lay plywood across the mud, from where we parked cars to access the arena, so we wouldn’t track mud into the new building. We walked in there and it was, ‘Wow, this is really something.’ It was, and it still is.”

Soon after he came home from the Vietnam War and joined The American Legion, Warnken entered the Post 68 volunteer cadre that runs the tournament. “I sell programs. And what’s really cool about program sales is that I have had the same people look me up every year to buy their program from me. So, it’s fun. You see the same people year after year after year. It’s fun to mingle with the crowd and peddle programs.”

“The dedication these volunteers have for this tournament is amazing,” says O’Sullivan, who joined the Legion in 1979, mainly because he wanted to help with the tournament. “They really want to be there, and they really want to do a good job. They’re invested in it.”

Post members never tire of all the work that goes into it, Warnken says. “We just can’t wait for it to come around every year.”

Thanks to the Legion’s involvement for the last 67 years, the tournament will be coming around annually at least through 2041.