Meet The First Inductees To The Minn. High School Basketball Hall Of Fame
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- They come from all four corners of this great state -- a state known for hockey, but that holds its own quite well, thank-you-very-much, at basketball. Yet they'd never had an honor like this until now: the new, Minnesota High School Basketball Hall of Fame.
The first round of inductees features a few eye-popping names.
Big Randy Breuer led Lake City to state titles before the Gophers and the NBA.
"It turned into a ghost town, just like any other town does during the state tournament, the small towns," he said. "It was a great place to grow up."
Khalid El-Amin owned the north side of Minneapolis in his high school days, and this honor ranks near the top of his basketball list.
"This ranks up with the national championship, and definitely with me living my dream and being drafted in the NBA," he said.
Janet Karvanon was one of the first to be identified as a standout girls basketball player
in New York Mills in the late 1970s.
"We didn't really know that it would still hold up," she said. "Here were are 40 years later, and we're getting together now with our teams at the 40-year mark for our three state championship run."
Edgerton won the hearts of the state with a small-school run to a state championship in 1960. They went in as a team.
"Some of the schools that we managed to defeat -- it was really quite interesting," he said. "We were playing our best ball at the end of the year, and it all turned out for the best."
Before the Gophers and the WNBA titles, Lindsay Whalen was honing her skills in Hutchinson.
"[I played] in the summer, mostly against the guys," she said. "Then it brought me to high school, and the Gophers, WNBA -- so it's been quite
Faith Johnson Patterson made it from the coaching bench, with state titles at DeLaSalle and Minneapolis North.
"I don't know what to say, I'm kind of speechless for the first time as a coach," she said.
Bob McDonald did it by winning over 1,000 games as a coach at Chisholm, and inspiring his family to careers in coaching along the way.
"You know he doesn't like all the accolades and all that type of stuff, but deep inside he's very, very happy," his son Paul said.
This was set up as a chance to call many to the spotlight for individual accolades, but that was not the takeaway. The real memories are wrapped up in the people that surrounded their careers -- and they will live forever.
"And how those friendships and memories are really cemented in your mind in a way that is surprising after all these years."
The last two inductees were Kevin McHale of North Oaks and Mark Olberding from Melrose.
