A Season To Remember

So…after a little deviation from my early life history, here we are back where we left off. Continuing the account of our basketball team brings us to our senior year and that eventful season which is forever burned in my memory. Thirty five years after the fact, there are flashes of memories of that special year that often cross my mind – memories from the past that are as priceless as any of this world's treasures.

We had worked extremely hard during the summer to improve our basketball skills and get in the best possible condition. Remember we had a goal, a burning desire actually, to win a state championship and we were pretty certain of who we'd have to go through to achieve that goal. You see, the guys from the year before had been denied a chance to play in the state tournament by a school from Birmingham that was renowned for having good teams almost every year. We just knew if we were going to state we'd have to beat the "Family" – Holy Family High School! Our coach had even posted a picture of some of their players on a wall in our gym – a picture that remained on that wall all season.

The schedule for our senior season was filled with schools in higher classifications than our small school, with only the necessary games against schools in our 1A classification. We had one of the smallest enrollments of any school in the entire state and our coach wanted us to play against the best competition available to prepare us for what we would face at the end of the season. We began the season with a huge win over 3A Sparkman High School and it looked good for our team at the outset of the season. One of the most memorable events for me during the early part of our season was a tournament that we played in Nashville at David Lipscomb College. The teams in the tournament were all from schools similar to ours in that they were also religiously affiliated schools. We had a really great time during those few days. We stayed in the dorms that were vacated for the Christmas holiday season and ate every night at a little pizza place that had live music (a guy playing the banjo and sort of singing). It was a great experience and we won the tournament as well.

As we entered the month of January, we had lost three games and although we felt they were games we should have won, there was no sense of alarm. We were confident that we'd take care of business the remainder of the way. However, the next few weeks were unnerving to say the least. It seemed that our dream of winning the state championship was coming unraveled as we lost seven of thirteen games during that stretch. No matter what we did it just seemed that we could not "right the ship" and this skid culminated in being put out of the county tournament by a team that we had beaten by 37 points just two weeks prior. It was during this difficult stretch of our season that I learned something about our coach that surely did not escape the attention of the others on the team. We were at a team meeting at one of our player's home, called by team members for the purpose of trying to sort through the losing skid we were on and rectify the situation. Our coach dropped by for a few minutes to address the team and I will never forget what followed. He brought out something in each and every player's life that had presented a difficulty and a challenge in their life and pointed out that each situation was something that every one of us had overcome and gone on with our life. Why, I wasn't even aware that he knew of the life-altering situation in my life that he mentioned – the death of my mother when I was four years old. What I learned about our coach at that meeting was, with all the yelling and angry looks and all the running us until we thought we were going to die, he actually cared for us as individuals. We were more than just players on a team that he happened to be coaching.

Well, we entered the area tournament with renewed determination and confidence that we would make the state tournament and win it. I'll have to say, however, it didn't seem that much of the rest of the student body of our school had much confidence in us at this point. But we pretty much breezed through the area tournament without much of a test by the teams we played. Shortly after the finish of the final area tournament game, we learned who we would have to play in the regional final game which was the last step to the state tournament – that's right, the "Family"; Holy Family High was our next opponent. Now, they had two guys that were 6' 6'' tall and could jump so high that they could block a 20 foot shot at its peak. In preparation for this, we met in the gym that Saturday morning and coach had the tallest player on our team hold a straw broom and we had to try to shoot over the broom while he tried to block shots.

Our style of play was high pressure defense and up-tempo, fast break, get the ball down the court and it worked quite well for us. But coach and his assistants thought we'd be better served against Holy Family to slow the pace down to a crawl. So the game that night began with us doing everything possible to keep the pace of the game as slow as feasible, but by halftime we found ourselves behind by 11 points. Through three years of playing for our coach, we had grown accustom to being yelled at and jumped on at halftime no matter how the game was progressing. However, this night we sat there in total silence as we watched our usually vocal coach as he paced back and forth for just about the entire halftime break without even a word. Finally he stopped in his tracks and asked, "Fellows, can we trap"? We, as a unit, answered "Yes, Sir" and we hit the court in the second half running the half-court trapping defense we had been trained to run for three years. The result was astounding! We tied the game before Holy Family was able to score and by midway of the fourth quarter we led by 16 points. Final score: ABS 66, Holy Family 61 – we were on our way to the state tournament!

Words fail me to adequately describe the experience of being a part of the only basketball team in school history to ever reach the state tournament. First there was the ride from Athens to Tuscaloosa. We stopped in Birmingham to get gas in the bus and while there we saw some kids playing at a school next door and couldn't help but notice the colors of their gym clothes. Someone called to one of them and asked what the name of the school was and the student said, "Holy Family". Wow! We told them who we were and they invited us into their school and served us refreshments and wished us luck. To this day I've always wondered if that was simply a coincidence or planned by our coach – maybe I'll ask him one day. Then there was the excitement and thrill of playing in Coleman Coliseum on the same floor where Alabama greats like Anthony Murray, T.R. Dunn, Reginald King and Leon Douglas played. What an unforgettable experience to be able to play the game we loved in the same arena as the Crimson Tide!

The thrill, the experience, and the excitement were great, but we were there on a mission. We were there to win the state championship! We played New Site in the first game and won relatively easily. The second game turned out to be the greatest test we would face in the tournament. Red Level had a very tough team and we trailed the entire game right up until ten seconds to go in the game. When that last shot went through to give us a one point lead and the final margin of victory, we and all of our fans went crazy! The third and final game of the tournament against Rebecca Comer was never really close as we won by 23 points. It is so rare for plans to work out just the way we want them to in this life but this time was an exception and our dream was realized – we were state champions!

What a magical conclusion to a dream first instilled in the minds of a group of little elementary school boys! It's as if someone wrote a fairytale with a storybook ending, only this story is true! Special thanks to Henry Fudge, Bill Murrell and Wayne Kuykendall.