It’s 700 wins and counting for Hillcrest Academy’s Dwight Gingerich

CEDAR RAPIDS — As a player, Dwight Gingerich remembered how fascinated he was by basketball strategy.

Even as a freshman for Iowa Mennonite’s very first team in 1972-73, he’d sit on the bench during varsity games and think about what it should do in a particular situation.

“Should we go zone now?” he’d ask himself. “Should we do some different things?”

Gingerich was destined to be a coach.

“It always just intrigued me,” he said. “I’ve always enjoyed competing, whether it was a board game or whether it was different sports, whatever.”

In his 40th season as head coach at the rural Kalona school now known as Hillcrest Academy, Gingerich reached a milestone last weekend. His team’s 63-26 win over Rivermont Collegiate of Bettendorf was the 700th of his incredible career.

Only five men in state history have accrued more: Bob Hilmer (the leader at 917), Fred Parsons of Van Buren, Al Marshall, Dan Beck and Mitch Osborn.

Like Gingerich, Beck (Easton Valley) and Osborn (Harlan) are still active. Unlike Gingerich, the five ahead of him got victories at multiple schools.

Every single one of Gingerich’s 700 has come at IMS/Hillcrest.

“I’ve had a lot of really committed players through the years and committed assistant coaches and committed families,” he said. “People that have allowed me to coach and to coach freely. It feels like a celebration, really, of a lot of people because it doesn’t happen without them.”

Gingerich played two years of basketball in college, then received an opportunity to be an assistant at Archbishop Carroll High School in Washington, D.C. That was under the late Jack Bruen, a highly influential coach who led Colgate University to back-to-back NCAA tournaments in the 1990s, tutoring future NBA first-round draft pick Adonal Foyle.

His interest in coaching fully fueled, Gingerich returned home, was an assistant at IMS for a couple of years and then took over the program in 1981. His very first game was at the old Shellsburg High School, though he honestly doesn’t remember if it was a win or loss.

IMS won just four times that 1981-82 season, though losing became an anomaly in short order. Gingerich has a career mark of 700-210, has led 12 teams to the state tournament, with his 1992 team winning a Class 1A championship.

“I feel like I still enjoy it. It brings me joy,” he said. “I enjoy the kids. It gives me an opportunity as a school administrator to kind of engage the students every day in an old classroom sort of way. So right now, I can say I still really enjoy it a lot.”

Gingerich is Hillcrest’s principal and also coached volleyball at the school for years. In 2000, he took a year leave of absence to be interim men’s basketball coach at Goshen College in Indiana.

The Mennonite-based school reached out to him and asked him to lead the program for the 2000-01 season as it searched for a permanent head coach. Despite having only eight players, Goshen won 10 games, including beating rival Bethel for the first time in years.

“I always felt like if the right situation presented itself again it would be kind of cool to do that again,” Gingerich said, when asked if he ever considered returning to the college game. “But just with family and different things along the way, it just kind of worked out to stay put here for this amount of time.”

So many kids in Kalona and surrounding areas have benefited from that decision. This particular Hillcrest team is fresh off a thrilling overtime win at Pekin, and now boasts a 5-1 record.

The Ravens aren’t big, their tallest kid measuring 6-foot-2, and there is only one of those. But they make do with what they have, of course, playing fundamentally strong basketball, as all of Gingerich’s teams seem to do.

The school has become one of the smallest in the state with an enrollment of just 64 in grades nine through 12. In an attempt to attract more non-Mennonite students, it rebranded to Hillcrest Academy in 2019.

Gingerich said there are 24 freshmen this school year, an encouraging sign. Hillcrest will honor their longtime coach and his 700-win achievement in a ceremony following Tuesday night’s home game against Highland.

“I really like how this group has responded,” Gingerich said of his current team. “They’re playing hard, there’s talent. They have really worked hard to improve from the beginning of the season to now. I’m just hopeful we can keep it going. Keep improving and see where it takes us.”