5/10/07.......

The Basketball Team picture was probably taken in 1945. That dates the picture to be over sixty years old. This ball team formed some eight years before I graduated. Even at that, I was able to identify most of the players. How about you? See if you can place a correct name on each individual. It may be fun in trying to look back and see if you can remember this team playing basketball. James Curtis may have been the only senior on this team.

Front Row kneeling and Left-Right: Junior Singleton and Jimmy Stewart.

Seated-Left To Right: Neal Maple, Glen Stewart, Jimmy Barnard, James Curtis, Johnny Render, Philip Maple, and Freeman Jones. Of course, that is Mr. Park kneeling next to Freeman.

On the back row, we have the honors of having the Cheerleaders included in the picture. The three cheerleaders from left to right are: Gladys Robinson, Lelia Doris Fulkerson and Betty Carol Tooley. Pictured from Left-Right on the back row are: Gladys, Billy Sam Drake, James "Tut" Clark, James Layman, George Akins, Claud Snodgrass Jr., Lelia, Unknown (Help appreciated), Clarence Coleman, Billy Gene Welborn, H. D. Bailey and Betty.

"Small Town" Basketball Teams are no more. At least, they are no more in this area. Just throwing a number out, and will pick sixty as that number. Would you agree that sixty would be a fair number, for an estimate, of the number of high school students in the Rockport High School in any given year. This number is being used as an average for any given year during its' existence. Sixty High School Students! About half of that would be girls. That leaves about thirty boys to select from for a basketball team. We always had "Try-outs" and probably half of the boys in high school tried out for the basketball team. Guess What? I don't remember any boy not "Making" the team. If they showed up for practice, they were a team member. Where am I leading with this? Guess what I want to emphasis is that our teams were competing with much larger schools. While we never played in the State Tournament, we were always competitive with the other teams. There were several small schools, like us, but very few schools that has less students. We were competitive and it was fun. We learned some of life's lessons. We got our exercise, which seems so important by today's standards. What more could one ask for?

This fine bunch of Cheerleaders and Basketball Players did well in life also. Just looking over the group, I see future teachers, engineers, construction workers, builders, miners, Military Officers, as well as those that spent most of their working career protecting us as soldiers. A few have passed on and over a third are still living in the Rockport area. Lead on Rockport.