A football practice gone horribly wrong

It took a few years for Coach Russ Sauter to build his football team at McCook High School. But in 1946, everything came together, and McCook, with a fine, mostly senior, squad captured the All Class Nebraska Football Championship.

Since McCook was near the bottom of the Class A schools in enrollment, Russ Sauter was acclaimed in sporting circles as something of a super coach for his ability to pull off such a feat.

In 1946, the McCook College team was just beginning to recover from its wartime woes. For the years between 1942 and 1946, McCook College, and other colleges that did not have programs affiliated with Army or Navy programs, was forced to rely on 17 year-olds and 4-Fs (draft status) to fill a team.

In 1946 the veterans had started to return to college to take advantage of the GI Bill, and McCook College football looked forward to being respectable once more. Dick Drake, who was a member of the 1946 MHS team, recalls that it was arranged for the McCook High School squad to have two game-type scrimmages with the McCook Junior College team. In the first scrimmage, early in the year, the high school squad played well and defeated the college team. However, later in the season, when the veterans got into better physical shape and began playing as a team, the College won the second scrimmage game.

In 1947, Coach Sauter's football genius was called into question. With a squad greatly depleted by graduation, Sauter's McCook team failed to win a single game. 1947 turned out to be a major rebuilding year, as Coach Sauter desperately attempted to bring along his underclassmen.

1948 showed promise that MHS was on the way back to football prominence. Coach Sauter, always the stern taskmaster, was pleased with the progress of his younger players. There was still a bit of carry-over from the Championship '46 team -- from some of the players that had been reserves on that team.

From time to time Howard Fletcher and Dick Drake and others from that team would lend a hand at practice to offer pointers on technique and give encouragement to the younger players.

Howard Fletcher was at an Aug. 24 evening practice, even before school had officially begun. It was hot, the players were tired, and Coach Sauter exhorted the team to move quickly to come together at one end of the field for a lecture before heading for the showers. It was usual, that any laggards were singled out by the rest of the team, and they became the focal point for a "dog-pile."

Richard Klein, a sophomore member of that team recalls that "dog-piling" was a custom that had long been a practice, not just with the McCook team, but generally with teams throughout the state.

One player was "it", and all the others would jump on him, and the entire squad would end up in a giant pile of arms and legs. Apparently it was meant to serve as a lesson to the laggard, so that the next time he would not be so slow.

Players, while they did not especially like the "dog-piles", felt it was something that they needed to do to prove their manhood.

Janet Fletcher, Howard's widow, remembers that Howard never did like the practice of "dog-piling." He tolerated it, but felt it served no good purpose. Coach Sauter hated it. He felt it was a dangerous custom, and a waste of valuable practice time. But it was a tradition, and while he did not instigate it, he also did not outlaw it.

But the "dog-pile" at the August, '48 practice, was the last one at McCook. When the bodies cleared away from the pile, there was one boy who did not get up. Ted Sloniker, a junior, and a center on the team, was not the laggard that had caused the "dog-pile," but he was a part of the mix of bodies. When the last man crawled away, Ted still lay on the ground. He was unable to move. A doctor was summoned, but by the time he arrived, Ted was dead. His neck had been broken in the scuffle.

Ted Sloniker was a popular fellow at MHS. He was interested in school and extra-curricular activities, especially football. He had an older brother, Earl, who had played football for McCook, and he had dreamed of being a member of the team from the time he was very small, when he attended games with his father.

From his obituary, "Ted, becoming enthusiastic one night when the ball carrier made a touchdown, jumped up and down, shouting, 'He made a home run!' Another time when Ted was very young the dial of the radio was tuned to a football game. Teddy, playing nearby jumped up quickly, saying, 'Daddy, poots ball game! Let's go to the poot-a-ball game.'

"Always in football season after Ted started to school, the little boys of or neighborhood used the back yard for a football field. At the age of 8 and 9 years Ted and his family lived across the alley from the McKillip family.

Leo, being older in years was always the coach. Ted, Glen Sliger, Joe Weiland, and other boys who happened to be present were his gridders."

Ted had narrowly escaped death on three other occasions before his fatal accident. At 14 months of age he got into a bottle of medicine pills, which were coated with chocolate, and ate almost an entire bottle. Quick work by a physician saved his life.

At age 4 Ted was cited as a child hero. He showed great presence of mind when his mother was knocked unconscious by an oil heater explosion in their home. Despite being burned around his head and neck, he stomped out a box of flaming matches, which dropped from the hands of his mother as she fell, preventing her clothing and the house from catching fire.

At age 9, Ted underwent a mastoid operation on his right ear. The operation seemed successful, but soon after he was stricken with a serious disease, and for weeks the family despaired for his life.

Perhaps Ted's close brushes with death gave him an insight to the after life. From his obituary, "He said many times, 'When your number is up, it was up, and it made no difference where you were, or how old you are.' He would tell us when we felt badly because someone had departed this life, that we should not feel sad, the one who had departed was more fortunate than we who are living, because you just began to live when you die."

Ted looked forward to the new school year in 1948. "He would swell with pride when the class of 1950 was mentioned, saying it is a swell group of kids, and largest class so far in the history of McCook.

When Ted prepared to leave home for practice on that fateful Monday evening he remarked to his parents, 'Life was just beginning again, now that school activities were starting."

That life ended abruptly for the sixteen year old, at 8:45 p.m. that evening, Aug. 24, '48.

The entire McCook community mourned Ted's death. His family was devastated, of course. Ted was well liked by his fellow students and his teachers. And his death had a very unsettling effect on the football team. But perhaps, Coach Sauter was affected by Ted's death as much as anyone. Coach Sauter, a truly good man and a fine coach, who had done so much for so many individuals, on and off the playing field, and was looked up to by so many, had failed to prevent this tragedy.

He did not talk much about the event, but at the end of the school year, at the very height of his coaching career, Russ Sauter resigned from coaching and teaching and entered the insurance business in McCook.

Dick Drake, who remained a close friend of Mr. Sauter to the end of his life, has no doubt that it was the death of Ted Sloniker that caused him to leave the coaching profession.