By Robb Garofalo
The Aberdeen Insider
When Byron Utter got word he was going to be inducted into the South Dakota Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Shrine he was, at first, a little surprised.
“I looked at the list of coaches already in and thought they were all pretty darn good and that even though I coached as hard, I never thought I was quite as good,” Utter said. “Looking back, I guess I can say we did something right.”
Utter, along with Mike Tuschen of Stickney, Ron Eastmo of Deadwood and Larry Rohrer of Beresford, was honored at the Class B boys basketball state tournament on Friday.
“This doesn’t happen without the kids who just worked their tails off. We had a great group of kids each year who worked as hard as we asked them to. My biggest regret is not telling those kids how much I appreciated their effort and how much they meant to me,” Utter said.
He also noted another area in which he might be honored for his efforts.
“You can say I’m in the hall of fame for ankle-taping,” Utter said. “We didn’t have athletic trainers, so thinking back, I probably taped around 35,000 ankles. Hey, back then you did what you had to.”
Utter spent the better part of 30 years roaming the sidelines, first at Langford, then at Mobridge. His job as head girls coach in Langford came about rather quickly and very unexpectedly in 1981.
“I was hired as an industrial arts teacher, and the night before the girls first practice, the superintendent came up to me and said the guy they hired as the girls coach called and said he was not coming after all and wanted me to take it,” he said. “The next morning, I met with the girls team and started the job.”
Utter inherited Langford team that had lost 45 games in a row
“The first practice, I saw why,” Utter said.
His coaching mantra was to outwork the other team, and under Utter’s tutelage, that’s exactly what Langford did. He transformed the Lions into one of the most successful Class B programs in the state. In the late 1980’s, Langford made three trips to the state tournament and amassed a 90-5 record with three of those losses at the state tourney.
The Lions were runners-up in 1989 and 1990. The point guard on those teams was Northern State women’s head coach Paula (Stolsmark) Krueger.
“Utter was, and still is, intense, caring, dedicated and always refused to be outworked. That’s just how he was wired, and that’s just how he coached and we bought into it,” she said.
Krueger also noted Utter’s development of players at an earlier age, which was not the norm at the time.
“He just spread his knowledge of the game to us as players, and we would share that with younger kids,” she said. “When we were freshmen, we worked with elementary-aged kids every Saturday. He was doing feeder programs at a time when feeder programs weren’t that cool. We would have Saturday hoop sessions with younger kids, and that was a part of his success.”
Utter remembers how well Krueger took care of the basketball.
“Paula handled the ball 90% of the time for us, and in 26 games had a total of 52 turnovers,” he said. “She knew they set me off, and she did an amazing job of running our offense.”
Utter also coached Julie (Jensen) Rozell, who went on to be Northern’s all-time leading scorer, though he recalls a rather inauspicious start to her career.
“Her first game in fourth grade, I’ll never forget. Off the opening tip she got the ball, turned and scored in the wrong basket, and I remember thinking, ‘Boy, this might be a project.’ Turns out, she was pretty good, and that kind of let me know that, yeah, maybe I knew what I was doing as a coach,” he said.
Northern State added an element to Utter’s success through his “working relationship” with some of the Wolves legendary coaches.
“I was lucky to be coaching near Aberdeen in an era that saw very successful coaches at Northern,” he said. “Don Meyer, Bob Olson, Bob Wachs, Freddy (Curt Fredrickson), I’d go to as many games as I could to watch and learn from them. I actually became friends with them and, at times, they’d let me sit in on practices. Again, very lucky that they were around during my coaching career.”
Utter left Langford in 1994 to become the track coach at Mobridge. Much like in Langford, the girls basketball position came open within a few days of his arrival.
“I figured it worked pretty well once, may as well give it another go,” he said.
Utter led the Tigers to a Class A runner-up finish at the 2006 Class A state tournament. He realized shortly thereafter that retirement was not far off.
“I had pretty serious back surgery and got a handful of get-well cards,” he recalled. “One was from the school board, which read, ‘Mr. Utter, we wish you a speedy recovery by a vote of three to two.’ I was thinking it may be time to quit. My daughters were finishing up school, and I chose to spend more time with my family,” he said.
Utter still pays attention to basketball, though his current passion involves a rod and reel.
“I don’t go out and fish, I go out and catch,” said Utter, an avid angler.
Krueger believes that falls in line with the type of man she used to know as a coach and now calls a friend.
“He’s just a doer. Whether he’s on the court or off the court, he has to be doing something,” she said. “He would go to the gulf shores right after retirement and text a picture on a boat saying, ‘Went out fishing today,’ and I would just feel bad for the fish because he’s not content to just sit on the boat. He’s gonna fish. Utter is just a doer, man, I tell ya.”
Not one to hold back on any subject, Utter said he’s seen the physical development of the game he coached for three decades, but doesn’t feel it’s improved the sport.
“There’s no question kids are more athletic, but the fundamentals — ball-handling, free throws — that part of the game has gotten kind of weak,” he said. “I drive around and see, I don’t know, 2,000 basketball hoops outside that no one is playing on. Kids are on travel teams, spend a lot of time with AAU, team camps. They’re constantly on the go. They are really good athletes, but not exactly good basketball players.”
Utter said when he’s out on a lake fishing, he’ll sometimes take a moment to reflect on the coaching career he “never thought would amount to much,” but wound up giving him some of the best years of his life. He finished with a 344-152 career record as a girls basketball coach.
“For all the hard work I asked out of the kids, we sure had a lot of laughs,” Utter said. “Those players helped me average 15 wins over my 30 years. I worked with great assistant coaches, some great colleagues and parents. I made a lot of terrific memories, and I’ve always been grateful for them.”
