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| Gus Tebell helped put the Red in his Terrors. |
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© Tim Peeler, 2023
Gus Tebell is a long-forgotten but important figure in the
history of NC State College athletics, a three-sport coach who led the football
Wolfpack to its first conference title in 1927 and the basketball Red Terrors to
its first league championship in 1929. He was also hired to be the school's freshman baseball coach.
He’s also important in the history of Virginia and the city of Charlottesville, too, since he landed there after folks in Raleigh thought he spent too much time worrying about the indoor winter sport and not enough effort on his gridiron duties.
Tebell is the only multi-sport coach to lead both schools, who will meet on the football field at Scott Stadium tonight in their annual ACC contest.
Had it not been for Tebell, however, Virginia may never have never been the ACC’s first expansion team six months after the league was formed in Greensboro on May 8, 1953.
NC State was one of the seven charter members of the Atlantic Coast Conference, along with North Carolina, Wake Forest, Duke, Clemson, South Carolina and Maryland. From the beginning, the new collection wanted one more team, with Virginia, Virginia Tech and West Virginia being the most likely choices.
Morgantown, West Virginia, was deemed too remote for all-sports competition and, at the time, the rest of the league was uninterested in the Hokies.
Virginia’s president, Colgate Darden, did not want his school to join the breakaway league, mainly because Virginia was fairly comfortable as an independent, having left the Southern Conference in 1936 in reaction to University of North Carolina President Frank Porter Graham’s radical plan to de-emphasize college athletes.
There was talk that Virginia would be a better fit to rejoin
the Southern Conference, of which it was a charter member dating back to 1921.
Its main rivals -- Virginia Tech, William & Mary, Virginia Military Institute, Richmond, George Washington and Washington & Lee -- were
left behind by the breakaway ACC. Still, the new league invited Virginia to be
its eighth member in August, just before the start of football season.
Darden had been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and Governor of Virginia before he became the fourth president of Thomas Jefferson's school. His opposition came with political heft.
Still, Tebell went over his president’s head to convince the school’s Board of Visitors to accept the ACC’s invitation, which it did on Dec. 4, 1953.
Tebell wielded such influence
among his new colleagues in the ACC that he was one of just two candidates to be named the
first commissioner of the ACC, but he ultimately lost to Wake Forest athletics
director Jim Weaver on a 6-2 vote.
Imagine, a former NC State football and basketball coach as commissioner of the ACC.
Tebell had a colorful career in athletics, as a successful coach, master marketer and talented administrator. He was also adept enough as a politician to be elected mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, just after World War II.
Tebell originally came to Raleigh in 1924 after a successful three-sport career in college and professional sports. In 1924, he was hired as an assistant football and head basketball coach. He was elevated to head football coach a year later when Buck Shaw left after just one season at the helm.
Tebell became the first coach in the history of the Southern Conference to win championships in both sports. He also launched the career of the most famous shoe salesman basketball has ever known, Chuck Taylor, whose signature on Converse All-Stars is just as famous today as it was a century ago. And Tebell offered many ideas that helped create interest in both sports as the school began to grow in the years following World War I.
At the age of 19, Gustave Kenneth Tebell (b. Sept. 6, 1897 in St. Charles, Ill.- d. May 28, 1969, Charlottesville, Va.) enlisted as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army for service in World War I in 1917. Immediately after he was discharged following the war, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, where he played football, basketball and baseball.
On the hardwoods, Tebell learned the game under Naismith Hall of Fame coach Dr. Walter Meanwell, who brought order to the sometimes rough-and-tumble game of college basketball. The “Meanwell System” relied on short passes, fancy dribbling and zone defenses and was later adopted by one of Meanwell’s other summer camp pupils, Everett Case of Frankfort (Indiana) High School. (Case’s notebook from his days under Meanwell’s mentorship is on display at the Reynolds Coliseum Walk of Fame and History.)
As a basketball player, Tebell was a three-time All-Big Ten performer who helped the Badgers win conference championships in 1921 and ’23.
Besides Meanwell, Tebell became friendly with some influential people in the development of the game, including an Indiana-born player named Charlie Taylor, who had coached at Columbus High School in Indiana a year before Case did. Tebell gave the kid a boost by inviting him to Raleigh in 1925 to conduct a basketball clinic during for the grand opening of Thompson Gymnasium, the school’s first indoor physical activities center.
By then, Taylor was known to everyone as “Chuck” and he had taken a job as a salesman for the Converse Rubber Shoe Company. Thousands of similar clinics later, Taylor was known as basketball’s biggest global ambassador and Converse rewarded him by naming a pair of high-top basketball shoes with a patch on the ankle in his honor.
As a coach at North Carolina State College, Tebell introduced such advances as bright red uniforms in basketball, the annual spring football game, a dorm and training table set aside solely for athletes and the first basketball game programs.
It was under his guidance that all NC State teams other than football were named the “Red Terrors,” because of his silken uniforms and the fast-paced play led by forward Rochelle “Red” Johnson, at a time every other sport on campus was led by a ginger star: football’s Red Lassiter, wrestling’s Red Hicks and track’s Red Hamrick.
In 1927, Tebell led the football team to a perfect 4-0 Southern Conference record and a 9-1 overall mark to record NC State’s only conference championship on the gridiron until Earle Edwards arrived in 1953.
Two years later, Tebell took the basketball team to Atlanta for the Southern Conference tournament, beating Tennessee, Clemson, Mississippi and Duke over the course of four days for the school’s only league tournament title until Case arrived for the 1946-47 season.
In the spring of 1930, after compiling a 21-25-2 record in football and a 76-39 record in basketball, Tebell announced that he would leave NC State to become an assistant football coach and head basketball coach at the University of Virginia. It was a relief to some...until his disastrous replacement, John Von Lieu, was named and didn’t even complete his only season as head coach.
In 21 seasons at Virginia, Tebell compiled a 240-190 record on the hardwoods, which still ranks as third all-time in career wins. He led the Cavaliers to its first appearance in a post-season tournament, losing in the first round of the 1941 National Invitation Tournament to City College of New York. He also spent three years as football head coach from 1934-36 and almost a decade as the school’s baseball coach.
Even after he left Raleigh, Tebell still had an impact on NC State athletics. He helped fuel the fire between long-time rivals Case and Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp. In 1950, both the Wolfpack and the Wildcats were among the best teams in the nation, with Case’s Southern Conference champions ranked No. 5 with a 25-5 record and Rupp’s SEC champions ranked No. 3 with a 25-4 record.
Tebell, the chairman of the Region 3 selection committee, suggested that the two teams decide the NCAA bid with a one-game play-off, a decision that decidedly favored NC State. Case agreed to play “any time, any place.” Rupp, whose team had won the previous two NCAA titles, didn’t believe his team needed to prove itself and refused to participate in a playoff game.
So the committee voted to take NC State over the Wildcats, infuriating Rupp and furthering the divide between him and Case, something that had festered for years.
The Wolfpack took advantage of the opportunity, advancing to the national semifinals for the first time in school history. Though it lost to City College of New York in the first game, the Case’s team beat Baylor in the consolation game, to claim third place in the tournament, the highest the Wolfpack ever finished in the national tournament until 1974’s national championship.
Tebell entered the world of politics in 1946 as a member of the Charlottesville City Council, where he served until 1954. That included one two-year term (1948-50) as the city’s mayor. When Virginia athletics director Norton Pritchett died in the summer of 1951, Tebell gave up his job as basketball coach to take over that position, which he held until his retirement in 1962.
Tebell remained for more than two years as a professor of Physical Education, before his final retirement in 1965. He died in May 28, 1969.
Both Wisconsin and Virginia present annual awards to male student-athletes in Tebell’s honor and, on occasion, NC State’s football, basketball and baseball teams still wear bright red jerseys.
