THEY WON’T BACK DOWN: State champion Flanagan-Woodland-Cornell girls basketball team finally gets its day

FLANAGAN – As the opening chords of Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” rang out and members of the 2007-08 IHSA Class 1A state champion Flanagan-Woodland-Cornell girls basketball team walked onto their former home court to finally, after multiple COVID-19 delays, accept their induction into the Illinois Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame, there were nothing but smiles.

Slow starts and delays never bothered this team.

It was all about how they finished.

On this night – Friday, Dec. 3, 2021 – it was as hall of famers.

On Feb. 23, 2008 – after a 1-4 start to the regular season and a double-digit deficit in the state title game – it was as state champions.

“I was thinking about it all day today,” Ron Spencer, the head coach of the title-winning Falcons, said before the ceremony at halftime of Flanagan-Cornell’s boys basketball game against Gibson City-Melvin-Sibley. “How that season started, how things just kind of fell into place with that group and a new school [Woodland] joining us and a new head coach, me, on top of it.

“It’s just amazing how that season went, from 1-4 to the final four, and then that championship game down 16 points [in an eventual 62-60, overtime win over Newark] and to come back the way we did. To cap it off so soon being inducted into the Hall of Fame as a team, it’s just amazing.”

The 2007-08 team was selected for induction in December 2019. Both the 2020 and 2021 IBCA Hall of Fame banquets were wiped out by the coronavirus pandemic, however, leading the organization to honor its inductees instead in person in the hall of famers’ hometowns when possible throughout this season.

Both coaches, half of the team’s four statisticians/managers and six of the 11 players on the varsity roster made it to Flanagan-Cornell High School on Friday to officially accept their induction. The team – the first Class 1A state champion after the IHSA’s expansion to a four-class system, adding an interesting footnote to Flanagan’s ability to claim the first IHSA state football championship as 1A winners in 1974 – was presented its old jerseys by Flanagan-Cornell superintendent Jerry Farris and an induction plaque by the IBCA’s Mark Kleeman.

Present Friday were players Emily Gundy (Place), Katie Spaniol (Bertsche), Jamie Russow, Caitlyn Jones (Lopez), Courtney Starkey (Detwiler) and the star of the 2008 postseason, Anna Jones (Zander); statisticians Kate Russow and Eleanor Spencer; and coaches Ron Spencer and Kelli Stanley.

Also members of the state champion 2007-08 Falcons but not in attendance Friday were players Renee Schneider (Richard), Anna Delheimer, Lanie Viti, Addie Girard (Folkerts), Taylor Wheat (Coniglio-Leveque); and statisticians/managers Emily Ruff and Charlotte Iverson (Curley).

“Our theme song that year was Tom Petty, ‘I Won’t Back Down,’” Spencer said. “That was the theme of our season, that was what we had on the back of our shirts, and that team just really embodied that slogan, that song. No matter where you’re at, up or down, we were just going to stand our ground.

“They just did that night after night, and here we are.”