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1938–39 Western Kentucky State Teachers Hilltoppers basketball team

American college basketball season

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMar 1, 2026
Entity authorityQ96362020 ↗
Source-derived summary

The 1938–39 Western Kentucky State Teachers Hilltoppers men's basketball team represented Western Kentucky State Normal School and Teachers College (now known as Western Kentucky University) during the 1938-39 NCAA basketball season. The team was led by future Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame coach Edgar Diddle. Former All-State player, Ted Hornback returned to his alma mater this season as assistant coach. He would remain in that position until Diddle's retirement in 1964, when he would be promoted to Athletic Director. The Hilltoppers won the Kentucky Intercollegiate Athletic Conference and Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association championships. All five starters, John Hackett, Harry Saddler, Wilson Stemm, Herb Ball, and Carlisle Towery, were selected to the All-SIAA team. Hackett, Saddler, and Towery also made the All-KIAC team.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “1938–39 Western Kentucky State Teachers Hilltoppers basketball team” is american college basketball season. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Western, Kentucky and State, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1938, 1964—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Western, Kentucky and State is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “american college basketball season” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q96362020. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1938 and 1964.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “1938–39 Western Kentucky State Teachers Hilltoppers basketball team” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.