Morgan Wootten, the legendary basketball coach at Hyattsville’s DeMatha Catholic High School, died Tuesday at his home in University Park. He was 88.

Over 46 seasons beginning in 1956, Wootten racked up a record 1,274 wins, the first coach at any high school, college or professional sports level to reach that milestone. A dozen of his players went on to play for the NBA.

In 2000, he became the first high school coach inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame, and innovations like the full court-press, man-to-man defense and the offensive foul have led some to contend he may have been the greatest basketball coach of all time at any level.

As impressive as his winning record was, players and colleagues remembered him as a teacher and mentor to his players and other coaches, but the record he was proudest of was a 31-year streak in which every senior on his team won a college scholarship.

A single game on Jan. 30, 1965, cemented Wootten’s legend.

Wootten had already built the team into a local powerhouse, but he wanted to push his team harder, so he set up a friendly game in 1964 at Cole Field House in College Park with New York’s Power Memorial Academy, another small Catholic school with a strong program.

Thanks to star player Lew Alcindor, better known today as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Power beat DeMatha 65-62, and the two coaches agreed to play again the following year.

Before the rematch, Wootten trained his team hard, having players practice throwing shots over a defender holding a tennis racket over his head to simulate Alcindor’s height. The game drew the interest of local papers as well as Time and Newsweek, drawing a sell-out crowd of 12,500 as $1 tickets were scalped for as much as $15 outside.

DeMatha won, 46-43, ending Power’s 71-game winning streak. The game boosted the school’s reputation, ushered in an era of national rankings for high school basketball and, with its two racially integrated teams, served as a sign of hope amid the violent backlash to the civil rights movement at the time.

The game’s legendary status only grew when Abdul-Jabbar went on to become a pro athlete widely considered the greatest player in NBA history.

“It’s funny,” Abdul-Jabbar said of the game. “I’ll be in some place like Montana or Arizona and someone will come up to me and say [something like], ‘I had a cousin who went to DeMatha and that’s the only team that beat you in your high school career.’ It comes back at me a lot of times. It’s certainly something I will never escape.”

But as Wootten once said, “you learn more from losing than you do from winning.”