In the beginning, there was Art Johlfs

How high school football national rankings got their start

Take a look at Wikipedia under “high school football national championship” and you will find a list of teams ranked No. 1 in the nation by various media organizations dating all the way back to the turn of the century (1900). However until 1959, no teams were actually chosen as mythical national champions by any poll. It was only after 1959 when a man named Art Johlfs took it upon himself to recognize the great teams of a bygone era.

Art Johlfs was born in 1906 and went to Fulda High School in Minnesota. He attended Winona Teachers College in the late 1920s, graduating in 1929 as a junior high school teacher. He worked for the school newspaper while he was in college as the sports editor. He also played on the basketball team. His brother Walter was a standout on the Winona team from 1926 to 1928 and ironically Walter graduated Winona before Art despite being two years younger.

Side note on Walt Johlfs. He went on to be a coach and industrial arts teacher at Columbia Heights from around 1930 to about 1945, when he moved with his family to Hollywood, Calif. While in Minnesota, his wife Peggy worked at an ordnance factory as an inspector. She is pictured in 1942 handing examples of mortar shells to President Franklin Roosevelt. Walter and Peggy had a daughter Betty, who married actor and boxer Ace Hudkins in the 1950s. Hudkins had a horse ranch with his brother and one of the horses was Trigger, which was ridden by movie and TV star Roy Rogers.

While Art was at Winona, he wrote feature articles that were distributed nationally. One was about a 95-year old woman from Fulda who could read without wearing glasses. The other was about a self-taught barber who refused to cut women’s hair because of their new-fangled hairdos. This was in 1927 while he was still at Winona Teacher’s College.

In 1941, Art was named principal of Richfield School in Minnesota. He stepped down from that job around 1946 to go into real estate at The Sharp Co. Around 1950, Johlfs joined Thorpe Brothers Real Estate. He stayed there until retiring around 1975.

There are a number of newspaper articles that mention Art Johlfs throughout the 1940s. One is a funny story about how to cook carp: Art submitted an old, family recipe. There were reports by Johlfs while attending basketball coaching clinics, a letter to the editor about National Boys and Girls Week. There were reports about bird watching and fishing and the best way to get rid of the “tent” caterpillar. He writes a number of letters to the editor concerning traffic (at least four we’ve found). Johlfs was a prolific Letter to the Editor writer. But interestingly enough, no reports on ranking national championship football teams.

Johlfs wrote to the Star Tribune in 1953 comparing the baseball careers of a pair of Fulda athletes, Al Worthington and George Pipgras. The story refers to a scrapbook Johlfs had from the 1920s. This is possibly a scrapbook from Art’s senior year at Fulda since he would have been 18 around that time.

There’s a blurb in the Dec. 14, 1953 Star Tribune mentioning Johlfs as being a regular at Minneapolis high school basketball games. This is likely when he first started to contact newspapers to tell them about his thoughts on the best players because the writer states “Art will gladly quote a few thousand well-chosen words on any state prep cage team with a handful of press clippings to back it up.” This is the first mention of Johlfs having a keen interest in the “best” high school teams of any kind.

First feature article on Johlfs appears in Feb. 8, 1956 in St. Cloud Times, written by Jim Klobuchar (father of future presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar). Story lists Johlfs as watching up to 140 basketball games a season and that he collects newspapers from all over the state (note it does not say all over the country). Story says that he catalogues the boxscores and has a big file of such. It also says he has been doing it for about 15 years. The story erroneously says that he went to University of Minnesota (he graduated from a state university - Winona Teachers College). However, it notes that he taught and coached at Glencoe, Deerwood, Cromwell, Alpha, Plato and finally Richfield (where he became principal). It was after the war that he went into real estate, “because that kind of work gave me the ideal chance to see as much high school basketball as possible.”

Story says that he periodically sends out rankings of Minnesota basketball to local newspapers. He is known to the sportswriters as “Basketball” Johlfs. He says that he does his rankings by using first-hand viewing of the teams, newspaper accounts and a collection of “spies”. It also says that he wouldn’t walk across the street to see the two best hockey teams in the world play. This is a bit ironic since he concluded his “rankings” career in the 1980s doing national ice hockey rankings.

Johlfs’ interest of basketball outside of Minnesota likely occurred in 1956. In the Winona Daily News, Johlfs is quoted that Minnesota Roosevelt set a U.S. record for points in a state championship game with 101. According to a column in the Jackson Sun (Tennessee) on April 15, 1956, Jack Hilliard writes that Johlfs had contacted him about the game and told the story about how he talked to the National Federation of High Schools to see if the 101 points was a national record, only to be told by the NFHS that it did not keep track of such records. Johlfs, according to Hilliard, then took it upon himself to see if the 101 points was indeed a national record. Why did Johlfs contact Hilliard? Because Hilliard, as he states in the column, had been putting together a similar basketball record book two years prior.

IN the Winona Daily News in Nov. 1956, there is a story about Art Johlfs doing Minnesota football rankings. This is the first mention of Johlfs doing any kind of rankings with regard to football. Two weeks later, Johlfs came out with his preseason basketball rankings. These are the first preseason rankings for basketball attributed to Johlfs.

A story in the St. Cloud Times in Dec. of 1956 has Johlfs writing to columnist Frank Farrington and giving him a bunch of stats, records and rankings about Minnesota basketball (nothing about national basketball or football).

In 1958, Johlfs is at the featured speaker at the Foley high school banquet. He is listed as a well-known Twin Cities Radio and TV personality.

Dec. 16, 1959, Johlfs is mentioned for the first time outside of Minnesota (other than the Jackson Sun article in 1956) regarding high school football. He asks the readers of the Louisville Courier Journal to send in any players who scored over 100 points or rushed for over 1,000 yards in the season. He is going to print up certificates for the achievement. A similar request appears in the Daily Republican (Monongahela, Pa.) in March of 1960. This article also mentions that he is compiling information to make national rankings for 1959 and for “past years”. This article also has the first mention of national high school football rankings with Massillon Washington rated No. 1, but only a top 5 is listed. It’s also the first article that mentions anyone getting a certificate for the 100 points club or the 1,000 yards club. Additionally, he asks for a summary of the best all-time teams from the state so that Johlfs can compile a “best all-time teams” from each state.

Johlfs is often attributed in stories about him as starting his national football rankings as a young man in 1927. However, if he was truly doing rankings since 1927, he would not need to ask newspapers all over the country to supply him with their best all-time teams. It also is the first mention of Johlf’s business, the National Sports News Service. He also adds that “with enough vital information, he hopes to rank the top 20 teams in the nation” But he adds “I need much, much more dope. High school records are poorly kept and I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has such knowledge in your district.”

The Daily Republic mentions Johlfs again in May for awarding certificates for 40-point basketball game and 1,000 career scoring. This appears to be the last time Johlfs is mentioned in relation with a 1,000-point or 1,000-yard or 100-point club and certificates.

In Jan. of 1961, Johlfs name is everywhere. Iowa, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Florida. A top 20 football national rankings is listed. No mention of any teams deeper than 20.

Johlfs 1961 rankings are distributed by UPI and AP and appear all across the nation. The story mistakenly refers to the National Sports News Service as “The Sporting News”, which also dealt with high school football during that era by releasing the Wigwam Wiseman All-American football team. A locally written story in the Massillon Evening Independent on Jan. 2, 1962, says that Massillon Washington, the national No. 1, has been ranked two times in the past three years. It says it first received citation in 1959. If Johlfs had been doing rankings since 1927, the story would likely have mentioned the seven other times Massillon had been ranked No. 1, but it doesn’t. Besides a top 20, an additional 62 honorable mention teams are noted (complete list unavailable).

An article in the Evening Independent says that Johlfs is collecting the balloting for The Sporting News’ All-American team. Only reference I’ve found linking Johlfs to any kind of All-American team balloting.

In a 1967 article in the Star Tribune, Johlfs says that he had seen every Minnesota state basketball tournament since 1922. In his obit, however, says he saw his first basketball game in 1928.

In an article in the Columbus Republic, 1980, Johlfs says in an interview that he has ranked teams for 30 years. Although Johlfs had turned over rankings to Barry Sollenberger in 1979, Johlfs still worked as the “midwestern office” for the National Sports News Service.”

In a UPI article in the Chicago Daily Herald in 1977, Johlfs states that he become interested in high school sports as a sub on the Fulda basketball team in 1920. The story quotes him as saying he had been doing rankings for 48 years. However this differs from other timelines given about when he started doing rankings.

Although he turned over football and basketball rankings to Sollenberger in 1979, he still did national hockey rankings all the way until about 1986. He passed away in 1988 at the age of 82.

It’s my belief that Johlfs started retroactively selecting “national champions” sometime after 1959 (he’s quoted in the Miami News in 1968 stating that he started in 1959), however the first list of his national rankings (dating back to 1927) didn’t appear anywhere until Johlfs turned things over to Sollenberger in 1979. From that point on, stories regularly mention schools that won “national championships” as chosen by the National Sports News Service.” Sollenberger is also the one who first began stating that the rankings went back to 1927, however according to an article on ESPN in the mid 2000s, it was Sollenberger who retroactively chose national champions from 1926 back to 1910.

I believe that Johlfs chose his retroactive list prior to joining Sollenberger. At some point, Sollenberger made changes, as seen in the differences on the Wikipedia page about the national football championship history. Changes are made from Johlf’s realtime selections that appeared in newspapers across the country to when Sollenberger published a NSNS newsletter in 1981, which shows a list of past “national champions”. More changes came when Sollenberger teamed with Doug Huff and those changes appeared in Huff’s national record book in 2001. Since then, Wikipedia seems to be a combination of the three rankings.

Today, there are multiple organizations doing national high school football rankings, including MaxPreps, High School Football America and USA Today. However, it all got started with Art Johlfs.