It turns out that Iola High’s basketball team did win a championship in 1915.
It just wasn’t the official KSHSAA State Basketball Tournament.
On March 4, the Register reported that the basketball team lost to Wichita 41-31 in the 1915 KSHSAA State Basketball Tournament championship game.
The Mustangs may have lost that game, but on an unspecified date in 1915 the team won a different state basketball competition — the University of Kansas Invitational Tournament.
Yates Center’s Jack Steiner, a local barber and Kansas sports historian, attended the KSHSAA basketball tournament this past weekend and bought an official program about Kansas’ high school basketball history.
In the program, it lists Iola as the winner of the invitational tournament which ran from 1908 to 1915 — making Iola the final winner of the invitational.
The official KSHSAA State Tournament started in 1912, which might be why the invitational was shortly disbanded.
It doesn’t list when the game took place, the final score or Iola’s opponent. There also is no information on how a team was invited to the tournament.
But, it does answer the question of why the 1915 boys basketball team is listed on the sign along U.S. 54 documenting Iola’s state champion squads.
Iola High’s boys basketball won the 1915 invitational
