Gregg Doyel

gregg.doyel@indystar.com

The Fightin' Engineers are on a school record 17-game winning streak

In the beginning, they played in a World War II airplane hangar. B-29s, the hangar once held. Planes similar to the Enola Gay, which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology got one of those surplus hangars and turned it into a basketball gym.

In those days, in that old airplane hangar converted into a gym in 1948 by an alumnus named Wilbur Shook, Rose-Hulman played up the combat angle. A huge banner unfurled from the ceiling – Give ‘em hell, Rose! – when the Division III women’s basketball team ran onto the court. A cannon exploded. Sirens sounded. Ten or 15 times a year, it sounded like war was breaking out inside Shook Field House.

Or the Fightin’ Engineers had a game.

When it started, their best player was a guard who had quit basketball after high school. Their starting forward hadn’t played since 10th grade. Their top substitute – their only substitute – was a tennis player who had never played basketball until that season. They had to teach her how to dribble. She spent most of the game on the bench, sitting next to the school president, Sam Hulbert.

This wasn’t your normal basketball team.

This was just 20 years ago. Rose-Hulman didn’t have a women’s basketball team until 1995-96. Rose-Hulman didn’t have women until 1995-96, when the elite engineering school founded in 1874 in Terre Haute became co-ed. The Fightin’ Engineers created a women’s basketball program by scanning the applications of incoming freshmen and flagging anyone whose extra-curricular activities included the word “basketball.”

Twenty years later, Rose-Hulman has one of the best Division III programs in the country. The Fightin’ Engineers are 22-3, the best record in program history, and they are regular-season co-champions of the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference for the first time. They enter the league tournament Friday night at Bluffton University – they play Franklin College at 8 – on a school-record 17-game winning streak.

In the beginning, the women of Rose-Hulman lost. They lost a lot. Every time they played that 1995-96 season, 20 up, 20 down, and these games were not close. The average margin of defeat was 48.9 points.

The players come back to campus from time to time. Reunions, homecoming, what have you. And every time he sees a player from that winless 1995-96 season, Rose-Hulman coach Jon Prevo says two words:

Thank you.

* * *

They laughed. They laughed a lot. There was the time the first coach in program history, Wanda Schwartz, called for Jamie Funk to enter her first basketball game and Funk ran directly from the bench onto the court. The ball is in play, and there’s Jamie Funk chasing the ball, giving Rose-Hulman six players – all six of its players – on the court. Officials would have called a technical foul, but they knew.

See, Funk was a freshman from Scottsburg who hadn’t played basketball. Ever. But she had played tennis in high school, so the Rose-Hulman coach called her and invited her to play.

“Oh, you don’t want me on your team,” Funk told Schwartz. “I’ve never played before.”

“You’re kind of tall,” the coach said. “I think it will work.”

Schwartz asked for Funk’s shoe size, ordered her a jersey, and that was that. No tryouts needed; she was on the team, she and four other girls who were similarly cobbled together. Schwartz had already called Becky Smith, who hadn’t played basketball since her sophomore season at Plainfield High School.

“I hadn’t even thought about playing college sports,” Smith says. “But they had a team, so I thought, ‘Why not?' ”

Well, Rose-Hulman almost had a team. The final piece was a freshman from the Minneapolis suburb of Stillwater, a girl named Amanda Speich. To land Speich, who had actually played as a high school senior – and get this, she had started that year – Rose-Hulman pulled out all the stops.

And a magic marker.

Rose-Hulman didn’t technically have a women’s team yet – no coach, no women on campus until the fall – but when Speich visited campus as a high school senior interested in engineering, Rose-Hulman officials added to her itinerary a visit with the school’s athletic trainer. The trainer talked about the imaginary basketball program and gave Speich a tour of Shook Field House, where she saw a big white ream of paper hanging from a wall with a picture of a basketball and the words: “Welcome, Amanda Speich, Future Fightin' Engineer.”

“’Oh, I think I’m done with basketball,’” Speich remembers thinking, “but I found out if I didn’t play, they might not be able to have a team. Being 18, none of us understood the full magnitude of what we were about to do.”

They lost 111-33 to Hanover, and 119-26 to Defiance, and 102-37 to DePauw. They often had more turnovers than points and occasionally finished games with four players because of fouls. They played cross-town rival Saint Mary-of-the-Woods for a trophy that was invented on the spot, paying homage to a factory in Terre Haute. They played Saint Mary-of-the-Woods for the Clabber Girl Trophy.

They lost, of course. Couldn’t even win the baking soda trophy.

* * *

They graduated with a record of 6-89.

Oh, did you think they never won at Rose-Hulman? It does seem that way. But, no. The Fightin’ Engineers went that first season in 1995-96 without a win, but soon they left behind that drafty B-29 hangar for a first-class facility – Hulbert Arena, named for the president who sat on the bench – and they also left behind their winless record.

Third game of the second season. On the road, against Agnes Scott.

“Oh my gosh,” Amanda Speich remembers thinking, “I think it’s finally going to happen.”

When this 55-43 victory for Rose-Hulman was finished, the Fightin’ Engineers were running around the court like they’d won a national championship while Agnes Scott players waited for the postgame handshake.

“They were glaring at us,” Speich says, “like, ‘What’s the big deal?’ ”

Agnes Scott couldn’t possibly understand. Twenty years after that historically bad start, the Fightin’ Engineers current coach – Jon Prevo – asks his players on this historically good 22-3 Rose-Hulman team to try.

“I talk about that (first) team all the time,” says Prevo, an assistant on the Rose-Hulman men’s team in 1995-96. “I witnessed that season. I was here and I know it wasn’t easy for them. Six players? They showed up every game, every day in practice, and they worked hard. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for what they did.”

So here’s what Prevo and the folks at Rose-Hulman did earlier this season. They invited the 1995-96 team back to campus – four of the six players still live in the area and showed up – and brought them onto the court at halftime. And then the original Fightin’ Engineers, who heard and saw so much in that season of 1995-96, heard and saw something unfamiliar.

A standing ovation from the crowd at Rose-Hulman.

Find Star columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at@GreggDoyelStar or atwww.facebook.com/gregg.doyel