By CHUCK OFFENBURGER

DES MOINES, Iowa, May 18, 2025 – We lost an MVP Iowan, Bernie Saggau, in the past week.

Saggau, who for nearly 40 years directed the Iowa High School Athletic Association, died at 96 years old on Saturday, May 10, in Sarasota, Florida, where he’d been living near his daughter Rebecca. This Sunday, May 18, would have been his 97^th birthday.

One of the high points of my career was that I was commissioned to write the biographies of both Saggau and his counterpart E. Wayne Cooley, who for 48 years ran the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union, and died at age 90 in 2013.

The book “E. Wayne Cooley and the Iowa Girl: A celebration of the nation’s best high school girls sports program” was published in early 2002. That was followed in 2005 by the book “Bernie Saggau & the Iowa Boys: The Centennial History of the Iowa High School Athletic Association.” Both organizations placed copies of the books in every public library and high school library in the state.

One of the biggest blessings in my life, I realized as I was doing the books, was that I had a whole lot of time in those five years observing, interviewing and hanging out with the two people most responsible for making Iowa the best state in America for high school athletics.

Interestingly, at the heart of their operations was their shared – but very independent of each other – belief and insistence that athletics be part of the overall education experience. They believed that sports teams are like classrooms, that coaches are first of all teachers, and that lessons taught and learned in athletics are as important as those learned in more traditional academic settings.

Saggau, one of Iowa’s best orators of his era, was especially emphatic about all the lessons to be learned.

“Over my 40-plus years on the job, no one’s ever heard me say that athletics are more important than any other activities,” he said in a press conference in June 2004 in Sioux City, where a group of officials and referees from northwest Iowa were honoring him. “Band, chorus, speech, debate, drama – all the activities are just as important as sports are. The key is getting our kids involved in something, and we’ve done a pretty good job of that in Iowa, because 80 percent of our high school students are involved in at least one extracurricular activity. You know, we have too much ‘I’ in our society today, and it’s in our school activities where we really teach the ‘we’s’ – the teamwork that our society needs.”

He told a banquet of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, “In athletics, I don’t know why losing is so terrible. I sometimes think it’d be better if we’d all go 50-50 all the time.”

In a “Sportsmanship Summit” that the South Dakota High School Activities Association asked him to address in Pierre, he said, “It’s not the winning that’s important. It’s the wanting to win that’s important.”

The cover photo from my 2005 book “Bernie Saggau & the Iowa Boys: The Centennial History of the Iowa High School Athletic Association.” (IHSAA photo)

One of my favorite Saggau moments came on our 12 hours of driving to Pierre and back for that appearance. I was using the ride for interviewing time. But once in eastern South Dakota on Interstate Highway 90, our chatter paused for a few minutes. He started to punch up some music on the radio of his Lincoln Town Car, then had a thought. “You know, I was always very interested in music,” he said, referring to his high school years in the western Iowa town of Denison. “In high school, I was in the glee club, the mixed chorus and I even had the lead in a couple of operettas. I especially remember being ‘Ralph’ in ‘HMS Pinafore.’ ” The next thing I knew, here was Saggau going into a lilting tenor voice and singing a line from one of his songs in that production: “Is there not one maiden here?” As I described it in the book, “It was one of those moments when somebody you think you know fairly well and have pretty well figured out, says or does something that makes you look at him or her in a whole new way.”

What it’s really all about, he told me over and over, is producing smart young people who are disciplined, respectful of opponents, know how to win and how to lose, and are good citizens.

“I could care less about how many All-Americans we produce,” he’d say in what almost became a mantra. “I am more concerned about all the good Americans we produce, not the All-Americans.”

Truth is, IHSAA member schools have probably produced more than their share of All-Americans, too. As well as five members of the professional baseball’s Hall of Fame, two Heisman Trophy winners, and nine Olympic gold medalists.

Friends and colleagues Jack Lashier and Bernie Saggau together when Saggau had turned 90 years old. (Lashier photo)

Saggau often surprised people. At 5 ft. 6 in. tall and maybe 125 pounds in his senior year of high school, he hardly looked like he could be a top 4-sport athlete. But indeed he was. What really made him, then and later in life, was that he was so competitive and an amazing leader.

“There’s this great story going back to about 1946, when Bernie had just graduated from high school,” said Jack Lashier, now of Clear Lake, who retired after helping Saggau develop and operate the Iowa Hall of Pride in Des Moines. “Here he was, this little guy out mowing a yard, when a car pulled up, stopped and two guys wearing suits got out. They asked him if he could direct them to Bernie Saggau. He answered, ‘Do you mean Bernie the dad, or Bernie the son?’ They said they were looking for the Bernie that had just graduated from high school. He said, ‘Well, that’s me.’ They explained that they were from Buena Vista College in Storm Lake, and they wanted to talk about him going to school there and playing football. Asking a 5 ft. 6 in., 125-pounder to play college football? He was shocked!”

It turned out they had learned about his leadership abilities, and that’s what BV really wanted for a squad of football players that would include a number of veterans just returning from World War II who would benefit from a leader who could rally them. Bernie Saggau, even then, was that enthusiastic and persuasive.

He graduated from BV, started teaching and refereeing and in 1963 joined the IHSAA as the successor to the longtime director Lyle T. Quinn.

Bernie Saggau at the height of his career. (IHSAA photo)

Saggau’s loyalty to BV lasted the rest of his life. He was still on the board of trustees when he died.

Last fall, he drove himself from his home at the Iowa Great Lakes to Storm Lake to attend the BV Homecoming football game and speak to the players and coaches.

And when the BV Alumni Association on May 3 hosted their annual “Senior Send-off” for graduating seniors, each of them received a gift from Saggau. He bought all of them BV souvenir cups and inside was a note to each of them. “In the note he congratulated them on their graduation,” said the college’s Tim Gallagher, who works in communications and development. “He asked them to continue to stay involved with BV in the future, always encourage the students, and if they could as life goes on, to contribute to BV with their time, talent and, if it works for them, their philanthropy.”

Gallagher was astonished. “Can you imagine a 96-year-old alumnus thinking of doing something like that?”

The university will honor Saggau in a special way later this year.

When his health was failing a couple of months ago, he was told of a fundraising campaign successfully completed among alumni and friends for the basketball court in BV’s Siebens Fieldhouse to be named “Saggau Family Court.” That will happen later this year.

“Bernie was honored and humbled,” Gallagher said. “He told me, ‘Buena Vista did a lot more for more for me than I ever did for Buena Vista.’”

But he did so much for so many. Former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack spoke – without notes – about that when the IHSAA hosted a packed retirement reception for Saggau on March 20, 2005.

“Bernie, I’m really glad you aren’t speaking today,” Vilsack said, “because that way, we won’t have to be compared to your oratorical skills.

“But I will tell you, you need to take a look at this audience, as I have from my seat here. There are governors in attendance, there are college presidents in attendance, there are noted authors in attendance, there are teachers and principals and administrators and coaches – all here because we owe you a debt of gratitude.”

He said in his own case, he was speaking after having witnessed the unifying impact on his town of Mount Pleasant from its high school athletic successes, and from the positive impact the IHSAA programs had on his own two sons.

But then speaking as governor, Vilsack continued, “Bernie, we’ll never be able to repay you for the tens of thousands of young people who have been raised in this state and have been touched by you. They are now across this country and around this world, living up to the standard that you set.”

A celebration of Saggau’s life is set for June 20 at 11 a.m. at Valley Church in West Des Moines, with a visitation beginning at 9:30 a.m. and a reception following the service. You can read his obituary by following this link.

—

You can comment on this column below or write the columnist directly by email at chuck@offenburger.com