Bob Lutz: Three decades later, Iowan Joe Auer becomes a City League legend

Joe Auer remembers what it was like coaching for 20 years against Carl Taylor, the man he’s about to pass as the winningest City League boys basketball coach.

“Carl was the fiercest competitor I’ve ever coached against, without a doubt,” said Auer, whose 317 wins during 21 seasons at Heights trail Taylor by one. “Carl scared me, to play against him. You knew that if they (players) were weak, those Southeast teams were going to crush you. We became friends later on, but early on I mostly just feared him.”

Heights is in Dodge City this week for the Tournament of Champions and the Falcons open Thursday against Leavenworth. Heights (8-1) is the defending champion in Class 5A.

For Auer, the road to this moment has been long. And hard. But mostly rewarding.

Heights has won five state championships under Auer, including four in Class 6A during Perry Ellis’ storied career. Since Ellis started at Heights as a freshman in 2008, Heights is 155-25.

Auer, 50, recognizes there’s some good fortune at work here.

“Perry’s like a son,” Auer said. “We’re very close. I’m close with his family. He set an example when he was here that we can always reference.”

Auer, whose Falcons lead Southeast by a game in the City League race, grew up in Iowa City and went to Iowa. He played football, basketball and baseball as a kid but knew, even as a walk-on baseball player at Iowa, he didn’t have the goods to make it as an athlete.

So he became interested in coaching, so much so that he went to Iowa basketball practices run by George Raveling and Tom Davis, thanks to a buddy who was a team manager.

“It wasn’t like those coaches took me into their office and explained things to me,” Auer said. “Basically, they ignored me. But they did let me watch and take stuff in.”

Auer became a high school baseball coach out of college and came to Wichita after Wichita school district administrators showed up at Iowa to recruit when the district expanded high school to ninth-graders in 1988.

Auer, who met his wife, Kay, while in college, came to Wichita for what he thought would be a practice interview. Then he would return to somewhere more familiar like Minneapolis or Chicago.

“They took me to Southeast, East, Northwest, and Heights was the last stop,” Auer said. “Dr. Martin Smith, the principal at the time, said I could teach government and be a varsity assistant in baseball and basketball.”

Wichita, it was.

There also happened to be an Iowa graduate working at Ernst and Young in Wichita and Kay, also a native Iowan, took a job here, too.

After seven seasons as Goose Doughty’s assistant in basketball, Auer took over in 1995. He was Heights’ baseball coach from 1990-2007 and has taught that same senior government class since he arrived.

“He has a real passion for teaching and coaching,” Kay Auer said. “He was always a competitor and you can see that intensity when he’s out there coaching. He lives his entire life that way, really. For him, if it’s not worth putting in 100-percent effort, then it’s not worth doing.”

Auer was in elementary school when the 1976-77 Heights team went undefeated and untested, really, to win a Class 5A title. A photo of that team, led by Darnell Valentine, Antoine Carr and Calvin Alexander, hangs in Auer’s office.

“I’m a historian and the City League means a lot to me,” he said. “Basketball is so important to this community and I know I have a big responsibility being a coach in this league.”

To that end, Auer is trying to get together players from the 1976-77 team, as well as players from the state championship teams he’s coached, for a reunion in February 2017.

“It’s unusual to be in a place this long,” Auer said. “But my dad worked at Proctor and Gamble from the time I was born until he retired, 37 years. And I love it here. Coaching in this league is such a great challenge and you never feel like you’re the king of the hill. You always feel like you’ve got to keep working hard and you can get beat on any given night. And that’s a lot of fun.”

Golf is also fun and Auer and his wife love to play. They picked up the game as adults and spend many of their summer days and nights playing at Tallgrass Country Club, near their house.

Their two sons, David and Nick, are college golfers — David is a senior at Kansas, Nick a redshirt freshman at UMKC. Both are studying accounting, following in their mother’s footsteps.

Auer is no accountant, but he stresses academics. Because he’s concerned about math scores in the school district, he makes a point of asking his players specifically about the math tests they have upcoming and tracks them on a marker board in the locker room.

“He pushes us to become better than we were in the beginning, when we got here,” Heights senior Aaron Williams said. “He’s a father figure to us because he does so much for us. We love him as a coach. There’s nothing that we can’t go talk to him about.”

Auer is surprisingly adaptable for a veteran coach. Has any coach with so much experience decided to change the way his team defends?

That’s what Auer did two seasons ago. The Falcons switched from man-to-man defense, which they had used almost exclusively under Auer, to zone.

“The pick and roll, I got really tired of trying to defend that,” Auer said. “And the zone we play, which is kind of a hybrid, has negated that. We can apply man concepts and it takes a lot of different shapes.”

Heights’ non-varsity teams still play man-to-man, Auer said. And he teaches man defense every day in practice because he doesn’t believe a team can play an effective zone without being a solid man-to-man defensive team.

For now, though, Heights is a zone team.

Auer said he’s tried to take things from all of the successful coaches he’s encountered in the City League, starting with South’s Steve Eck, who led the Titans to six state championships from 1986-96.

It was Taylor, who coached Southeast from 1992-2012, who caused Auer the most sleepless nights.

“We had the privilege of beating him in two games I’ll never forget,” Auer said.

The first was in 1998, Auer’s third year. The Falcons had won 13 games total in Auer’s first two years, so he wasn’t feeling all that secure. And in the final regular-season game, he said, Southeast blew out Heights by almost 30.

But in the sub-state championship game, Heights pulled an upset and went on to finish second in Class 6A.

“Mostly, I felt a sense of relief that I could win a big game in this league against a great coach and great team,” Auer said.

The next came in 2009, when Ellis was a freshman.

“I asked our kids, ‘Who would you want to play to maybe win our first state title since 1977?’ ” Auer said. “And we all wanted to play Southeast because we owed them. It was out of respect because these guys have buried us for years.”

And so it was. Southeast, the defending 6A champion, was Heights’ opponent in the state championship game. The Falcons won 73-58.

“Carl Taylor was such a competitor,” Auer said. “His kids played so hard and if they smelled blood, there was no letdown. He was a guy who would much rather win by 25 or 30 than let you leave the gym feeling like there was hope. His teams were going to destroy all hope and maybe have you re-think your passion for basketball.”

This week, the torch could be passed. And Auer will be the City League’s standard bearer in wins for some time since there isn’t a current coach in that realm. (Carroll’s Lonnie Lollar is next with 123 wins.)

Auer is a City League guy through and through. He appreciates the league’s history of successful coaches and great players. If anyone is going to pass Taylor, it should be someone who knows what Taylor, who died a year ago, represented.

Auer is that someone.

This story was originally published January 20, 2016 at 4:03 PM with the headline "Bob Lutz: Three decades later, Iowan Joe Auer becomes a City League legend."