May 1, 2008
Alamo Man on First UNLV Basketball Team

Mike Prince, circled.

By Dave Maxwell, Staff Writer

When Mike Prince started college in the fall of 1958, he enrolled at a small school in Las Vegas named “Nevada Southern.” The school had just moved into its new building, Maude Frazier Hall, on its new campus along Maryland Parkway. The school is bigger now; it is still on Maryland Parkway and now goes by the name UNLV.

That fall, Nevada Southern also hired a new men’s basketball coach and teacher, Michael “Chub” Drakulich, from Rancho High. He would also serve as the school’s first Athletic Director.

That first year he was given a handsome budget, $10,000, to work with to fund all of the school’s athletic programs, basketball, golf and tennis.

By a fortunate turn of events, Mike Prince had graduated from Rancho High School and played for Coach “Chub.” Nevada Southern did not have a basketball program, so Mike figured his playing days were past. But one day Chub stopped him in the hallway and said, we’re having basketball practice starting at such and such a place at such and such a time, “That shocked all of us,” says Mike. “We had no idea they had a basketball program at the school.”

Prince, along with several other young men, turned out for practice and made the team. Mike played as “Number 2” guard, which meant he was a shooting guard. They had no gym to practice in, so they worked out a deal to use Fremont Junior High School gym on Sahara. “Our home games were played at the Dula Center on 5th (now Las Vegas Boulevard) and Bonanza,” Mike says.

That first year it was difficult to get games, “because we were a new school and everybody’s schedule was full,” Mike recalls. Still, playing as an independent, they were able to line up 22 games, mostly away, against teams such as Long Beach Naval Station, Nellis Air Force Base, Branch Agricultural College (now SUU in Cedar City), Dixie College in St. George, Riverside JC in Riverside, Calif., Eastern Utah, and Long Beach JC (now Long Beach State). “We were pretty much like a junior college and were thankful most of those schools were very accommodating in making room for us on their schedule,” Mike remembers.

The Rebels were 13-9 that first year, playing with only Freshman and Sophomores and he says they were really surprised at the large number of spectators who came to their home games. “High school basketball was still the thing in Las Vegas at that time.”

Nicknamed “The Silver Fox,” because of his prematurely graying temples, Drakulich was a brilliant tactician. “A real master of strategies,” said Mike. “He was a father figure; we loved to play for him. He was a good friend as well as a coach. The best part of the team was Coach Chub.”

Coach “Chub” favored man-to-man defense. “Zone is harder to teach, but the team employed a 2-3 when the occasion called for it,” Prince explained.

Drakulich passed away in December 2004, in his early 80’s. He was a graduate of White Pine High School in Ely and later the University of Nevada Reno. He had played semi-pro baseball with the Reno Silver Sox and coached baseball at Fallon High. In 1955, he joined the faculty at the then new Rancho High School in Las Vegas. He was Athletic Director at UNLV from 1958 to 1973 and coached both basketball and golf.