Basketball

Basketball was ’’THE” sport where I went to school. I began playing basketball on the Junior Varsity when I was in the seventh grade. This was a small mountain town with a consolidated school district which bussed kids from twenty miles away and still only had a school population of around 200 in first grade through 12 grades.

Seventh through eighth grade was Junior Varsity and tenth through twelfth grade was Senior Varsity. As I remember it you could only have 15 players on a team. We played a few teams that had 15 players but most had less. When I first played while in the seventh grade we had ten or twelve players but by the time I reached Senior Varsity around seven to nine players which meant that the better players were expected to play the whole game without a substitution.

            The best record our team had of any year that I played basketball was my first year. our Junior Varsity team that year had a record of twenty two wins to two losses. I was the first person to come off the bench to substitute for the point guard position. My older brother was the starting point guard. I got to play a good bit that first year and I was the starting point guard every year after that through the twelfth grade.

            The only game I got to start during that first year was the championship game at an Invitational Tournament  at Harrison Arkansas. The coach started the second string players and when we were down about 20 points he put the first string players in and they would come storming back and get ahead by a few points then he would put us second string players in and the team we were playing would charge ahead of us again. He did this for the game making sure that the other team would win the game which they did with the help of our coach.

            After the game he took us out to a nice restaurant and told us to order whatever we wanted to eat because he would pay for our meal. I don’t know who paid him to let the home team win but it was obvious to us that there had been a payoff. The other tournament game we lost was because of our overconfidence. We had already beat the team two time that year during regular season, so we thought we have this game already won. We lost.

            In my best year I average 20 point per game. My highest scoring game was 48 points.

I had two people talk to me about a basketball scholarship during my High School years. One was my High School coach. He told me there was no question about it that he could get be a scholarship at Clinton Teacher College. The other person was a referee at a game that we played in Hector Arkansas. He asks where I planned on going to college. I told him I did not have the money to attend college. He said if you can play ball all the time like you did tonight you can get a full scholarship to attend college. At that time I had no plan whatsoever to attend college. Two years later I was married and enrolled in California Baptist University and working my way through school. I did not even attend a basketball game during my college years.