The Gophers' biggest rivals in recruiting in-state basketball talent starting in the early 1930s and for two more decades were the Hamline Pipers, coached by Joe Hutton Sr.
The competition was such the Gophers refused to play the Pipers, even though an annual game could have filled what were then 18,000-plus bench seats in Williams Arena.
This isn't exactly Hutton getting Vern Mikkelsen out of Askov High School in the mid-1940s, but the latest player to emerge from that Hamline recruiting battle is doing his best to make emergency repairs to first-year coach Ben Johnson's thin Gophers roster.
Will Ramberg was a 6-foot-5, do-everything player for Cook County High School. He graduated in 2019 with 1,346 points, the most in school history.
This is the only high school in the county and located in Grand Marais. Enough travelers make it that far along the North Shore that this was recent news in the Star Tribune:
News did not spread so easily on Ramberg's basketball exploits. Which makes it rather wonderful for Cook County folks to now look in a Big Ten boxscore to find their local hero playing 14 minutes for the Gophers, even if it was in Tuesday night's 76-53 loss to Illinois and its mighty Kofi Cockburn.
How was it trying to help with that well-muscled 7-footer?