By Mike London
Salisbury Post
LANDIS — Fifty years ago, there was a strange boys basketball season in Rowan County.
Bob Pharr was still coaching the Salisbury Hornets in 1975-76, but they went (9-14, 7-9) and tied for fifth in the nine-team South Piedmont Conference, where the power teams were Asheboro (26-2, 10-0) and Thomasville (18-6, 12-4).
The rest of Rowan County was competing in the North Piedmont Conference. West Rowan (8-16, 5-10) and North Rowan (8-15, 6-9) had down years, which meant the Hornets, Falcons and Cavaliers were a combined 25-45, which is hard to imagine.
The second-best team in the county that season was the East Rowan squad (13-12, 8-7) that tied for fourth in the NPC. The Mustangs were led by Rick Vanhoy, the county’s scoring leader with 20.3 points per game, William Lombard, Kizer Sifford and Walter Sifford, who passed away recently.
Vanhoy’s scoring average got a boost from a 42-point effort in the 84-64 win against West Iredell. That’s a school record that has stood the test of time at East for half a century.
The Rowan boys program that put together a team for the ages 50 years ago was South.
The Raiders played four guards and one post, but they were an unusually fast, smart and cohesive group. Four of the starters — James Allen, Jeff Long, Robert Brawley and Darnell Reid — had grown up together in the same neighborhood, the Rose Hill community between Landis and Kannapolis, and they stuck together at Corriher-Lipe Junior High, and then at South.
Jeff Long’s older brother. Vernon Long, had been one of the pioneering Black athletes at A.L. Brown and Lenoir-Rhyne and had been a key piece in back-to-back Western North Carolina High School Activities Association championships for the Wonders in 1966-67 and 1967-68, but Jeff Long chose to play with his life-long buddies with the Raiders.
When the four Rose Hill lads were seniors they were joined by a sharpshooting junior from China Grove, Mike Propst. South went 24-4 and lost only one conference game. That lone loss was in overtime.
The 24 victories is still South’s school mark for victories in a season 50 years later.
The late Terry Jones, who had taken the reins of the Raiders for the 1969-70 season as a 24-year-old, had to weather some rough times when South was still in the South Piedmont Conference, but the Raiders moved to the NPC for the 1973-74 school year. South turned the corner in basketball in 1974-75 when Allen, Long, Brawley and Reid were juniors. That team went 17-7 and laid the foundation for the record-breaking 24-4 squad that followed.
“One of the best teams the county has seen,” Allen said in an interview 10 years ago. “No way any South team has been better. We were good at transition basketball and we had players with different skills. Long and Propst could really shoot the ball. Brawley was a great rebounder, and he’d get 20 some nights. Reid was blue collar. He did the dirty work. He hustled and he played great defense. I was quick on defense. My job on offense was to get everyone else involved.”
Allen was the Rowan County Player of the Year for 1975-76. Brawley joined him on first team all-county. The other players on first team all-county were North’s Donnie Williams, Salisbury’s Melvin Reid and East’s Vanhoy.
Reid and Propst made second team all-county.
Allen averaged 17.6 points, mostly on drives and transition layups, while Propst (12.6) and Brawley (11.2) also averaged double figures. Long and Reid averaged just under 10 points apiece. The bench help was provided mostly by Doug Moseley and Tim Corriher. Moseley had played with the Rose Hill boys at Corriher-Lipe. Corriher, who died recently, late became a coaching icon at South.
The 1975-76 Raiders averaged a brisk 69 points per game, although opponents often tried to slow the pace down.
South’s season began with a win over A.L. Brown. There also was an early win against West Meck.
South was 7-0 when it lost to East Rowan 56-54 in overtime in the championship game of the Christmas Tournament at Catawba College, the tournament we now know as the Dale’s Sporting Goods Sam Moir Christmas Classic. The Mustangs held Allen to 11, while Vanhoy and Kizer Sifford combined for 37.
Allen described that painful loss as the turning point in South’s season.
“A game we should never have lost, but we made up our minds after that to take care of games early,” he said. “If we got a team down at halftime, we kept them down. We didn’t want to be in a position where a call could beat us.”
There was one more painful loss for the Raiders to endure in the regular season. North Davidson (19-5, 12-3) had Steve Cloer, who broke the school career scoring record that season. Coach Pete Jones’ Black Knights were talented enough that future NFL player Perry Tuttle came off the bench. The Black Knights were the second-place team in the NPC and beat the Raiders 56-53 in overtime.
When South played at North Davidson, the Lexington Dispatch sportswriter wrote that South “moved with the quickness of a roadrunner cartoon” and wore “jet-propelled tennis shoes.”
After the loss to North Davidson in January, South wouldn’t lose again for a long time, breaking the school record for consecutive wins with 15 in a row. Three of those victories were paybacks against East Rowan. One of them was 91-66.
Late in the regular season, South Rowan played South Iredell. The Vikings had a competitive team — they tied East Rowan for fourth place in the NPC — and they boasted a superstar in Jack Campbell. Campbell was the NPC Player of the Year. He scored over 40 points twice that season and averaged 26.7 points per game.
Campbell still wasn’t the highest-scoring player in the NPC, as Davie’s Dwayne Grant, the future Catawba College star, averaged 28.5 points. Grant scored 40 in an 82-73 loss to South Rowan.
Campbell got 31 in what would be an historic game against South Rowan, but Allen scored 35 that night. At the time, that was South’s school record. The Raiders couldn’t be stopped, made 48 field goals and shot 60 percent from the field. The final score was 108-86. The 108 points are another South school record that still stands after 50 years.
Long notched the 100th point with two minutes left.
That’s 108 points in regulation and without a 3-point line against a competitive squad. Allen is certain that a lot of the buckets Long and Propst made in that game would be 3-pointers in today’s game. Long scored 26. Propst, Brawley and Reid also were in double figures. The starters accounted for 97 points.
“That game speaks for itself when it comes to the kind of team we had,” Allen said. “I don’t think any team in the county has ever scored like that without 3-pointers. “We were good athletes, and we understood the game.”
South’s epic season didn’t have a happy ending. The only trophy the Raiders claimed was for their 14-1 record in the NPC regular season. North Stanly, the third-place team in the league, beat South 81-71 in the NPC Tournament championship game. North Stanly guard Darrell Mauldin couldn’t be contained that night and scored 35 points.
In the WNCHSAA Tournament that followed, Allen scored 21 as South beat Crest 60-49 for its 24th victory, but the Raiders lost to SPC champ Asheboro in the tournament semifinals. The final game for South’s super senior group was on the floor at Catawba College. It was a tough game, 66-59, but Asheboro’s 6-foot-8 Bob Hovey proved to be a difficult matchup for the Raiders.
Asheboro went on to seize the WNCHSAA championship. The Blue Comets took care of Shelby two nights after they got past South Rowan.
Jack Lytton gave Allen a chance to play in college, and he went on have a fine college career at Mars Hill. He had a record-breaking 204 assists in the 1978-79 season. He had a record-breaking 17-assist game against Barber-Scotia on Feb. 26, 1979. Allen served as an assistant coach a long time at A.L. Brown, alongside Shelwyn Klutz, another Mars Hill guy.
Allen’s teammates found good jobs, stayed with them, and prospered in the work force.
South has had several other good teams over the years, but the 1975-76 squad remains unsurpassed.
