Three coaches in 66 years.
When Thomas Gieske takes the sideline this winter, he’ll become just the third new head boys basketball coach Hillsboro has hired in the past 66 years.
Think about that for a second.
The world looked completely different when Ed Beyer first took over. It looked different again when Elliott Rotvold got the job. Now, another generation gets its turn.
Let’s take a trip through history.
When Ed Beyer took over the Burros in 1960, there was no ESPN, no Super Bowl and no three-point line. The Vikings and Twins didn’t exist. The Lakers were packing their bags for Los Angeles. If you wanted to argue about basketball with a stranger, you had to actually find a stranger.We were four years away from the Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in America. Newspapers and radio were the main sources of news, gas was measured in cents per gallon, Dwight D. Eisenhower was President and Wilt Chamberlain was the reigning NBA MVP.
Coach Beyer wasted little time making his mark. In just his second season on the bench, he took Hillsboro to their first state tournament appearance in school history. We showed a link to his legendary matchup with Jack Demaine in 1992 earlier this year. He would make 12 more trips to the state tournament during his career, including four championship seasons in 1973, 1974, 1977 and 1981. He finished his career with a record of 688-195.
Beyer once reflected on his time by saying, “We got tradition going, and tradition is an amazing thing. All the little kids were out there watching and they wanted to grow up and play for the Burros.”
By the time Ed Beyer retired in 1997, he wasn’t simply handing Elliott Rotvold a coaching position. He was handing him one of North Dakota’s premier basketball programs. Thirty-seven years earlier, Hillsboro had never played in a state tournament. By the end of Beyer’s career, the Burros had become synonymous with winning.
1997, Elliot Rotvold hired to take the reigns.
Rotvold took over in 1997 after getting a phone call from Ed Beyer while coaching in Wakonda, South Dakota. (Yes, Wakonda.)
This was a different planet from the one Beyer inherited in 1960, although it would look pretty foreign to anyone under 25 today, too. Bill Clinton had just begun his second term. The internet technically existed, but most Americans weren’t using it at home yet. Those who were, got to experience the unforgettable combination of tying up the family phone line and listening to a modem scream at them for 30 seconds before they could check their AOL email. Google wasn’t a company yet. If somebody called while you weren’t home, they left a message on the answering machine. Somehow society continued to function.
Meanwhile, Michael Jordan was heading toward the final season of the Bulls dynasty, Tiger Woods had just obliterated Augusta in his first Masters victory and the NWO was running roughshod over WCW. Lute Olson, a North Dakota legend from way back in Mayville, had just coached Arizona to a national championship.
Future Story Alert: Lute Olson moving to Grand Forks for his senior year and leading Grand Forks Central to an improbable State Championship in 1952.
And if Elliott Rotvold wanted game film on Friday night’s opponent, he wasn’t clicking on Hudl.
He needed a VHS tape.
Kids, ask your parents.
Rotvold had already been successful on his own in South Dakota when his former coach brought up the opening. He came into an established program with multiple decades of tradition to live up to.
He also entered Region 2 at a time when the talent pool was as deep as it had ever been. May-Port CG had just completed a dominant run through the ’90s, and multiple Region 2 teams would find themselves ranked among the state’s best year after year. That included the 2002 season, when five teams were ranked in the state’s Top 15 at the same time. (Another story for another day.)
During Rotvold’s tenure, four other Region 2 programs combined to win five state championships: North Border in 2001, May-Port CG in 2002 and 2003, Grafton in 2008 and Thompson in 2019. The Burros added two of their own, capturing back-to-back state championships in 2017 and 2018.
Rotvold also coached through the first three seasons of North Dakota’s newly implemented three-class basketball system, which moved Hillsboro-Central Valley into the middle division.
Now, for the first time since 1997, somebody else gets the job.
2026, Thomas Gieske and the future of Burro Basketball
When Thomas Gieske steps onto the sideline this winter, he’ll inherit one of North Dakota’s most tradition-rich basketball programs. Ed Beyer built that tradition. Elliott Rotvold spent nearly three decades carrying it forward. Gieske now begins the next chapter in Hillsboro.
Gieske begins his tenure much earlier in his coaching career than Rotvold did. But he brings a different background to the position. A former NSAA Player of the Year and NAIA Third Team All-American at Mayville State, Gieske has spent the past two seasons learning under Rotvold while preparing for his first opportunity to lead a varsity program.
As far as what life looks like now compared to the previous two hires, the differences are staggering.
Coach Gieske takes over in a world powered by smartphones, social media and artificial intelligence. Hillsboro games can be livestreamed on Your Live Event, NFHS or any number of platforms. Coaches exchange game film instantly through Hudl instead of trading VHS tapes or driving across the state to scout an opponent in person. Players have access to thousands of instructional videos with a few taps on a screen. Communication with athletes and parents happens through text messages, email and team apps rather than landline phone calls and answering machines.
Think about the distance between those three eras.
When Beyer arrived, the Vikings and Twins didn’t exist.
Rotvold arrived, and Google basically didn’t exist.
Now Gieske has arrived and you can ask artificial intelligence to tell you who won a Hillsboro basketball game 50 years ago while watching the current team play live on the same device in your hand.
America went from rotary phones to landlines to smartphones. From newspapers and radio to cable television to social media and artificial intelligence. Basketball added the three-point line, instant film exchange, analytics and livestreaming along the way.
Nowadays with parents and admin having less and less patience, loyalty, or common sense towards coaches, it’s remarkable that Hillsboro has pulled this off. There are programs who change coaches every 3-4 years due to different circumstances. Do we believe it’ll be three decades until the boys basketball job changes again? Who knows.
Beyer got a world without the Twins or Vikings. (Editor’s note: It’s worth mentioning that the Vikings’ Super Bowl win total remained exactly the same through all three coaching hires.)
Rotvold got a world without Google and then watched the entire tech boom unfold during his tenure.
Gieske gets AI, Hudl, livestreaming and whatever comes next.
Three coaches. Three completely different versions of America and basketball at large.
And sometime around 2055, apparently, Hillsboro will start thinking about hiring coach No. 4.
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