Judging strictly by the numbers, 1968-69 was the most successful basketball season in the history of Calhoun County. Three teams advanced to the state championship, two of them won titles.
The South Calhoun Hornets, led by coaches Rosa Lee Holmes and W.C. Loggins and star player Maxine Mhoon Brown won their class and then finished second in the overall “Grand Slam.”
“By the time our class finished high school, they had to buy a new trophy case for all we had won,” said Brown, now a retired teacher living in Derma.
1968-69 Bruce Trojans
The Vardaman Lady Rams won their class at state and advanced to the overall competing with all classes where they finished fourth. They were led by coaches W.B. Gregg and James Marshall Casey.
“We were a close team. We enjoyed playing basketball together,” said Lorna Parker Reifers, one of four Lady Rams to earn all-state that season. “I think that’s one reason we were so successful. We didn’t have anybody real tall. We had just played together so long.”
The Bruce Trojans, led by Coach John Burt and leading scorer Larry Joe Herndon, also advanced to state where they knocked off the number one ranked team prior to finishing fourth overall.
“We didn’t get off to a great start that season,” said Herndon, who now lives in Birmingham. “Everything just came together for us at the right time.”
The slow start had something to do with the absence of Larry Jennings and Darrell Logan at the start of the season. Logan had broken his collar bone in the last football game of the season, a 7-6 win over New Albany, and couldn’t play basketball until after Christmas.
“I hated sitting there and watching,” Logan said. “I wanted to play.”
He wanted to play so bad that sometimes it cost him.
“We were playing in a tournament I think in Pontotoc and Coach Burt told us we’re going to work the ball and try to get it inside to Herndon,” Logan said. “First time down the court my brother Satch (Logan) tosses it to me and they back in on Herndon and I’m wide open, so I shoot it and missed. Going down the court I hear Coach Burt, ‘Darrellllll, get the ball to Herndon!’”
Next time down the floor the exact same thing. They were crowding Herndon, Logan was wide open so he shot and missed. It happened again the third time down the floor and Burt called timeout.
“It wasn’t a minute gone in the game,” Logan said. “I sat on the bench the rest of the night.”
Darrell Logan
“Sometimes I had to rein Darrell in,” Burt said. “He thought the rim was the size of a washtub and he could just throw it up there anytime.”
“I did like to shoot,” Logan laughed. “The next game I started Coach Burt said ‘we’re going to get the ball to Herndon aren’t we?’”
Everybody the Trojans played in the playoffs they had lost to in the regular season. They beat Coldwater and then Lafayette, who had beaten them three prior times, in the championship game to advance.
“I think playing in the Little 10 Conference, which was so good, once we got everybody back healthy we were prepared,” Burt said.
The Trojans would beat Leflore and overwhelm Baldwyn 90-60 to advance to state, but went as a lower seed after losing a close game to Drew at North State.
That put the Trojans playing number one Hancock North Central in Jackson – the team’s most memorable win. To a man, the most common story from the game was the ending.
“Last two minutes of the game and we were up 4-6 points,” Logan said. “We come down the court. I think we need to hold the ball and we pass it to Larry Joe and he shoots and misses. They go down and score. We come back down and give it to Larry Joe and he shoots and misses again and they go down and score to tie it up. I’m getting on Herndon good walking to the bench. We were ahead. We shouldn’t be shooting that. My brother Satch looks at me and says, ‘Don’t you say nothing to Larry Joe, if it wasn’t for him we wouldn’t be here.’”
“I was thinking the same thing as Darrell at first, but Satch was right,” Burt said. “We wouldn’t have been there without Larry Joe. I told him going into the overtime, when he got it to shoot.”
“He hit three straight from deep in the corner in overtime to help us win that game,” Logan said.
Herndon finished with 40 points.
“That was one of those nights I was just in a zone,” Herndon said. “It was a good feeling.”
The Trojan team consisted of Benny Parker, J.R. Reese, Tony Turner, Charles Kelly, Wade Burt, Rodney Brown, Ricky Martin, Milton Allen, Jennings, Logan and Herndon.
“Larry Joe and Rodney Brown had good talent, but we all just played hard, worked hard and enjoyed it,” Logan said. “That was our team.”
“What always meant a lot to me was how successful they all were after school,” Burt said. “Rodney, Charles, Darrell, Larry Joe, Satch, Ricky, all of them. I took a lot of pride in all those boys.”
There was plenty of pride in Vardaman as well as the Lady Rams of 1968-69 were unbeatable.
The team, consisting of Alice Long, Sandra Mitchell, Shirley Easley, Colleen Griffin, Linda Vanlandingham, Shirley Pickens, Dianne Bryant, Gayle Vanlandingham, June Wells, Kathy Murphree, Charlotte Armstrong, Sheila McGregor, Jan Gregg, Cristie Easley, Shirley Parker and Lorna Parker never lost through junior high and high school until they met Houlka in North State.
“You might say we were a little over confident going in, I can admit to that right now,” Lorna Parker Reifers said. “We played Houlka in Brandon and they beat us by one point. That changed everything for us. If they hadn’t beat us, we wouldn’t have won state.”
They met up with Houlka again in the state tournament and blasted them.
Larry Joe Herndon
“We were all ready for them,” Reifers said. “We stayed in the same hotel as Houlka when we were in Brandon. We asked Coach Gregg if we could go say something to the Houlka coach. He said, ‘no you don’t need to do that,’ but we went up to him anyway and said, ‘You ready to play ball?’ He said yes. ‘We are too so you better be ready.’”
“He just laughed,” Reifers said. “I think that game was the biggest memory for all of us.”
The Lady Rams “bombed” Improve, the top team from South Mississippi and also defeated Salem to win the title.
“After that loss to Houlka none of the games were all that close,” Coach Casey said, who was in his first year as an assistant. “We just had a great tradition at Vardaman at the time. The girls expected to win.”
They did that, blowing through the competition. Their dominance was reflected in that an unprecedented four girls from Vardaman were named to the All-State team – Shirley Easley, Sandra Mitchell, Colleen Griffin and Lorna Parker.
“We won the Big Black Conference earlier that year and all of our players were on the all conference team,” Reifers said.
The Lady Rams advanced to the “Grand Slam” where they took on the champions of the other classes and were beaten by Pelahatchie.
“Among the things that always stood out to me was we had a lot of people that followed us all year. Reuben and Anna Byars never missed a game. Treetop Morgan, Howard Easley were always there, too,” Reifers said. “We had a good following.”
“I remember a write-up that appeared in a Jackson paper that said, ‘As long as there’s a Vardaman, they’ll always remember the class of 69.’ That thrilled us,” Reifers said.
“That was just a very good group of girls that worked hard and gave no excuses,” Coach Casey said.
While the Lady Rams had a tradition of playing together, South Calhoun was more of a blend of talented players.
1968-69 Vardaman Lady Rams
“We were a group of girls who really started out playing against each other as seventh graders,” Maxine Mhoon Brown said. “The schools weren’t integrated. So some went to the black elementary school in Vardaman and some in Calhoun City. We had girls from a couple difference places.”
“When you finished eighth grade in Vardaman we were bussed to Calhoun City to South Calhoun. We started as freshmen together and played together all through high school. We had a chance every year.”
Brown recalled Coach Holmes taking her and some other girls as freshmen to Jackson to watch the championship games.
“She took us in her vehicle,” Brown said. “A couple of us there said, ‘we are going to play in the championship game our senior year.’ It came to fruition.”
Playing basketball was a true joy for Brown and her teammates.
“We didn’t have other extra curricular activities. Most of us grew up playing basketball and stick ball,” she said. “I remember my parents made us a hoop out of a rim from a bicycle wheel and my mother got my father to nail it up on the side of our smokehouse and we had a little rubber ball you could wrap your hand around and we made it into a basketball.”
The girls had to wear dresses to school and at recess they would play basketball.
“We would go home and our dresses would be ripped under the sleeves. We played against the boys, beat the boys, it didn’t matter,” Brown said. “We just loved to play.”
“When we got an opportunity to get in the gym and play, we made the most of it.”
1968-69 South Calhoun Lady Hornets
The Lady Hornets included Nellie Mhoon, Nida Pratt, Jessye Pratt, Jeraldine Henderson, Shirley Thomas, Elnora Darby, Gladys Prescott, Dorothy Jones, Ruth McKinney, Betty Herrod, Donnie Sykes, Debra Perry and Maxine Mhoon Brown.
They won the North Mississippi BB title at home in Calhoun City.
“People from all over the district were there for that North Half Championship. It was standing room only around the stage and against the walls,” Brown said.
They went to Jackson and won the State BB title defeating New Hymn 45-32. Maxine Mhoon Brown scored 34. She averaged over 30 points per game for the season.
They returned to Canton for the Grand Slam after winning state where they opened with a win over Boler of Decatur, the Class B champion. That advanced them to the overall final where they were beaten for only the fourth time all season by Port Gibson.
“In our first game at state we were a little nervous and got down early, but Coach Loggins called some timeouts to try and settle us down,” Brown said. “Once we settled down we started playing our game and won.”
“We loved to play and had a lot of good players that got after it,” Brown said. “Those were good times.”