A month ago, Donnie Bunyon, a key member of Santa Rita High Schoolโs 1999 state basketball championship team, visited his alma mater and walked through the Eaglesโ aging locker room.
Bunion took photographs of the โ99 state championship poster, stuck in a dusty corner, torn, dangling above a box of trash.
Another image showed a wrinkled banner โ State Champions, Boys Basketball, 1999 โ hanging above a door leading to a locker room clearly in need of paint and repair.
It was a sad reminder of how some TUSD high schools have been affected by declining enrollment the last decade or so. A visitor could have never guessed that from 1998-2011, Santa Ritaโs boys basketball team, as coached by Jim Ferguson, was as good as it gets in Tucson and in Arizona.
Fergusonโs Eagles not only won 1999 and 2010 state championships, they finished No. 2 in 2005, 2007, 2008 and 2009. Beyond that, Fergusonโs best team mightโve been his 2000 club, which lost in the state semifinals to Dick McConnellโs title-bound Sahuaro Cougars in an epic finish before an overflow crowd of 4,000 at Catalina High School.
Talk about the good old days.
In 2000, Fergusonโs club defeated defending mythical high school national champions St. Anthonyโs High School in a game in Delaware. They whipped Paducah High School, the defending Kentucky state champions, at the Beach Ball Classic in Kissimmee, Florida, and upset the No. 1-ranked prep team in America, Newport Prep.
โIโm not sure of the number, but I believe we won over 40 straight games against teams from the state of Arizona,โโ Ferguson says now. โI believe we would have won a second straight state championship had not our player of the year, Mark Brown, suffered a sprained ankle against Sahuaro (in the state semifinals).โโ
If any basketball player or coach in Tucson history knows what a championship team looks like, it is Ferguson. He was an all-city player on Sahuaroโs 1970 state title team, coached by the iconic McConnell. Ferguson went on to play college basketball Seattle and UC-San Diego before returning to Tucson, an assistant coach on Santa Ritaโs 1979 state runner-up team, coached by Pima County Sports Hall of Famer Dave Lynch.
But winning the 1999 state championship stands out as the hallmark of Fergusonโs career.
The Eagles had three future college players: Utah State starting point guard Brown, Fort Lewis (Colo.) forward Ryan Sonnek and versatile Alan Batiste, who had helped Californiaโs Mission Viejo to a state championship.
They received quality support from Bunyon, Brian Grant and Terry Scott, sweeping the state playoffs with victories over Glendale Independence, Sahuaro, Glendale Apollo and Phoenix Thunderbird.
Not only was winning a state championship in 1999 a considerable accomplishment, surviving week by week play in Tucson was about as difficult as it has been for the last 30 or 40 years. Tucsonโs prep basketball landscape in โ99 was loaded with future college players such as Salpointeโs Jason Dickens and Justin DeBerry; Puebloโs Jeff Clark, Mical Kidd, Sammy Wade and Hakim Rasul; CDOโs Doug DโAmore and other all-city standouts such as Adam Eichorst of Sahuaro and Keith Washington of Palo Verde.
But in 1999, only Santa Rita won a state championship.
If anyone fully appreciated the โ99 title it was Ferguson, who had to pause his head coaching career for eight years in a political mess created by TUSD administrators.
After behind hired as Santa Ritaโs head boys basketball coach in 1984, replacing Lynch, his mentor, Ferguson was informed he would have to reapply for the position in 1985. TUSD officials said it had botched the hiring process, then based on seniority within the district.
After reviewing the process, it replaced Ferguson with Sean Elliottโs former Cholla High School coach, Mel Karrle. Ferguson spent the next eight years as a teacher and counselor at Santa Rita. When Karrle resigned in 1992, Ferguson was rehired as head coach.
โMy coaching career was taken away for eight years for no fault of anything I had done,โโ Ferguson told me in 1999. โIโm disappointed I missed out on those years.โโ
But Ferguson made the most out of his second chance, coaching 16 teams into the state tournament, winning 10 league championships, and making seven โFinal Fourโโ appearances. His career total of 370 victories mightโve surpassed 500 had TUSD not botched the hiring process, but in the end, Ferguson prevailed.
He retired from coaching in 2011, one year after Terrell Stoglin led Santa Rita to the 2010 state championship.
