If you crunch the numbers, you’ll find that the greater Tucson area has fielded close to 1,400 boys high school basketball teams since 1960. Five have gone undefeated. That’s .04%.
Across those six decades, the undefeated state champions were:
Tucson High School, 1962: 21-0.
Marana High School, 1969: 24-0.
Marana High School, 1972: 25-0.
Pueblo High School, 1978: 28-0.
Sunnyside High School: 1993: 29-0.
The 1962 Badgers got their start on an undefeated season in ‘61, when All-State center Ray Kosanke emerged as perhaps the state’s top player.
But just as the ‘61 Badgers began to threaten powerhouse Phoenix Union High School, winners of six of seven state championships from 1955-61, Kosanke was diagnosed with the mumps.
The 6-foot-9-inch junior missed the final two weeks of the regular season, returning for the state playoffs, although not close to 100% physically. The Badgers were eliminated by Catalina, which then lost to Phoenix Union.
But when the next season began, Kosanke was back to full strength — and so were coach Tony Morales’ Badgers. Four Tucson High players made the Star’s all-city first team: Kosanke, jet-quick guard Jessie Peoples, forward Leroy Taylor and shooting guard Chester Willis, who had moved back to Tucson from Southern California for his senior season.
When the ‘62 Badgers were inducted into the Pima County Sports Hall of Fame in 2019, Mike Aboud said that just making the varsity roster, 12 players, was ridiculously difficult.
“You can’t imagine how many young men tried out for our team,” said Aboud, a long-time Tucson attorney, a junior in ‘62 who would go on to become a two-year starter for the Arizona Wildcats in the mid-’60s.
The Badgers rolled to 19 consecutive victories before reaching the state semifinals. The competition became much more intense. Taylor’s basket in the final 30 seconds gave Tucson a tense 54-52 win over Phoenix Central, which led to one of the most anticipated showdowns, then and now, in Arizona prep basketball history.
Tucson would face the greatest team in Flagstaff High School history, a 23-0 squad led by Jimmy Dugan, who might’ve been the top athlete in Flagstaff history. A crowd of 4,000 squeezed into the ASU gymnasium for a back-and-forth championship game. Tucson won 54-52 as Kosanke scored 28 points, while Dugan added 22.
Kosanke was chosen the state’s player of the year. There was much more to Kosanke than basketball. A 4.0 student, Kosanke chose to attend Stanford rather than stay home and play for the UA. He started for Stanford’s 1965 and 1966 teams, averaging 12.5 and 14.0 points as the Cardinal became John Wooden and UCLA’s top competition in the Pac-8, finishing second in 1965.
Kosanke then played in Belgium for several years before embarking on a distinguished business career. He founded the Cal Energy Group, became COO of the Kyocera Solar corporation and developed into a prominent author and magazine reporter, writing about NATO, OPEC and the renewable energy industry. Kosanke spoke fluent German, French and Dutch as he traveled internationally while becoming a global authority on renewable energy.
Tucson High basketball player Ray Kosanke led the Badgers to the 1962 state title.
At the 2019 Pima County Sports Hall of Fame ceremony, Kosanke spoke about his ‘62 Badgers teammates rather than his career.
“The five starters got all the accolades, but those who didn’t start really kept us sharp in practice every day,” he said, pointing out the career success of ‘62 teammates such as Mike Butler, who was a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Marines, becoming a colonel in Washington D.C., Pete Samorano, who became captain of the Tucson Fire Department, and Don Bacon, who moved from a Sears sales position to become a TUSD dropout prevention counselor and volunteer coach.
Peoples, the all-city guard who played at Arizona Western College and then spent two years in the Army, was killed in an automobile accident in South Tucson in 1968. Willis, who worked for the City of Tucson, died in 2008.
“It was a special group,” said Kosanke, who lives in Southern California. “We came from all walks of life and together became champions.”
