On Feb. 11, 1979, a sporting event in Chick Evans Field House held the attention of more than 5000 human beings. Not until Kenny Battle bounced off backboards from 1984-86 for the NIU basketball team would so many people focus on one individual and his contortions in that gym.

The individual was Indiana State’s Kurt Thomas, a world champion still hoarse from the national talk-show circuit. His purpose was to do his part against the NIU men’s gymnastic squad which would finish undefeated, and call two NCAA champs its own.

“The atmosphere was one of wild frenzy,” exclaimed the next day’s Northern Star. Gardens of flowers intended for Thomas were flung from the bleachers, and a score of matside cameras snap-shotted history.

NIU won that day, led by champs-to-be Mike Burke, Kirk Mango and sixth-year coach Chuck Ehrlich.

Mango and Burke are gone now, as are Doug Kieso and Kevin Ekberg, Huskie national champs in ‘82 and ’83, respectively. They came here to better their minds as well as their sport, and at the end of four or five years they moved on.

Ehrlich stayed throughout, collecting three Mideast Region Coach of the Year honors and pushing Illinois youngsters into NCAA qualifying spotlights, while watching the country’s love affair with his sport fade.

Western Illinois and Eastern Illinois cut its programs in the mid-70s. Illinois State dropped gymnastics for “lack of participation” in 1982 and Southern Illinois cited economic reasons for the stoppage of Saluki gymnastics last year. Even Indiana State, Thomas’ national trampoline, had put its money elsewhere. NIU and Universities of Illinois-Champaign and Chicago were the Illinois remainders of the Thomas-Bart Connor inspired national craze.

With dying enthusiasm came lesser talents, and the Illinois high schools where Ehrlich so often shopped were now offering fewer bargains. Ehrlich’s teams had won the majority of their meets just once since 1982, and risking Illinois high school alienation, he began to look out of state and even to foreign lands for talent.

“Chuck wants one thing more than anything else—to be on the floor at the NCAA tournament,” UIC gymnastics coach C.J. Johnson said.

Though some say there was in-state talent, and it snubbed NIU because of its rural atmosphere and the lure of Big Ten schools, Johnson said he has trouble keeping kids in the city.

“Kids want to get away from home. I can recruit out of state easier than in state,” Johnson said.

But Ehrlich always did what he wanted and survived longer than most who whistle a different tune because he produced winners. It was no secret that Ehrlich rubbed administration the wrong way and vice versa. Johnson, who said Ehrlich “always had that friction” because people misinterpreted much of what he said, admitted the Illinois talent pool has been thin, but the foreign relations did send a message to high school talent.

“He was basically telling Illinois high school coaches to go to hell,” said Mark Watman, boy’s gymnastics coach at Homewood-Flossmoor High School in Homewood, Ill. Watman added that Ehrlich’s recruitment of foreigners was a “critical mistake. He’s bringing in world class gymnasts. High school kids aren’t in that class.”

“NCAA gymnastics is ‘American,'” Johnson said. “Kids have dreams to be at the NCAA tourney, just like other kids dream about major league baseball. It’s something in their blood.”

The known reasons for Ehrlich’s resignation—difficulty in recruiting American talent, recent misunderstandings with players and rumors of cancelling NIU gymnastics—fed on each other. A coach can’t attract prospects to a program said to be near an exit sign. A coach then seeks gymnasts abroad, who may not quite have the work ethic he is used to, thereby frustrating him. Certainly, the rumors did nothing to enlarge the uncomfortable small talk between Ehrlich and Huskie athletics.

The seemingly inevitable axing of the program—though any such action is denied by NIU—brings other coaches a step closer to their fate.

“I hope to hell they don’t drop the sport,” said Johnson, who blames the scarcity of gymnastics programs on poor budgeting and administration. “We’re down to the point that if we don’t have TV revenues, the NCAA will drop the tournament and then will my administration want to keep (gymnastics)?”

“If college programs go, are high schools next?” asked Schaumburg High School boy’s coach Howard Rubin. “We don’t want to see any program go down.”

Ehrlich will go down with no name-calling or griping, as a winner, and though he wasn’t a “company man,” he will be missed by members in what Johnson called “a kind of comradeship,” among gymnastic coaches.

“NIU was a real stab in my back. I’d always look up and see them ahead of us nationally. He kicked our ass,” Johnson said. “But I know Chuck knows what the hell he’s doing in gymnastics. He’ll make it someplace. I can’t see him not trying. I envy him because I’ve been one time (to the NCAA tournament) and he’s had (36 individual qualifiers).”