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MAKE HISTORY • COMMENTARY

State Championship Will Echo

Through Boy’s Lifetimes, Ours

By TOM HEITZ • The Freeman’s Journal & Hometown Oneonta

Tom Heitz

COOPERSTOWN – The date is uncertain. But it happened at the Clark Gymnasium in a building on Cooperstown’s Main Street a few years before the turn of the 20th Century. Someone propelled a large round ball into the cone of a metal hoop in the middle of the gym floor “to score a basket” for the first time.

Likely no day has since passed in the intervening 125 years in this village without a ball passing through a hoop. First conceived as a winter indoor agility and upper-body exercise by Dr. James Naismith at Springfield College in western Massachusetts, basketball evolved into a competitive enterprise separately for both genders before World War I. By the 1920s basketball had emerged as a favored winter indoor sport.

In the spring of 1925, Red Bursey, a four-letter man and All-American athlete from Springfield College, arrived to become the high school’s first college-trained coach in basketball, baseball, football and swimming. Bursey’s tenure at Cooperstown Central School extended into the 1960s and his life in the community 20 years beyond that.

Fifty years ago, in mid-February 1969, the school district dedicated its new gymnasium to Bursey. Since 1969, more than 1,200 basketball games, played by girls and boys, have taken place there. Along with basketball, hundreds of other athletic contests and events have been held in Bursey Gym. But, most of all, Bursey Gymnasium has been the venue where our youth, both boys and girls have been coached, have practiced and competed in basketball games. They have learned to play together, to play fairly, within the rules, unafraid and respectful of opponents, to win or lose gracefully.

While our children demonstrate their enthusiasm and love for basketball, Bursey Gymnasium is where we gather to witness their skills, not just as parents, but as a community. And not infrequently, parents and grandparents watch wistfully as their children, their grandchildren and perhaps one day their great grandchildren, engage in basketball competition on Bursey’s hardwood floor.

However, Bursey Gymnasium has never been the only basketball venue in our community. The Alfred Corning Clark Gymnasium of the 1890s, long since re-located to a sprawling campus in Middlefield, has become a nursery for future Cooperstown basketball players, both boys and girls. Available at times and seasons when the school is closed, the Clark’s gym floor serves as an incubator for future hoop stars. There, expert instruction, competitive peer experience, and hours of solitary practice have honed the skills of basketball athletes for decades.

Last Sunday, at Binghamton, the Cooperstown Hawkeyes’ boys won a Class C New York State Championship.

I have been privileged for the past 30 years to be the public address announcer at home games at Bursey for the Cooperstown boys’ teams. But, I first encountered most members of the current 2019 New York State Class C championship team at the Clark Sports Center.

Their ages were then but single digits. They could barely dribble or raise the ball to the hoop.

Years passed, and as I took my exercise on the track above the Clark Sports Center gymnasium, I saw them grow from peewees into sizable teenagers and formidable basketball players under the tutelage of “Living-Legend” coach Sharky Nagelschmidt.

In recent years, the current Hawkeyes came into the care of junior varsity coach John Lambert, himself a former player, now completing his first year as varsity coach.

Truly, the Cooperstown Hawkeyes’ boys’ team of 2018-19 accomplished something of multi-generational proportions. It will echo through their lifetimes and resonate in our own memories for decades to come.

Tom Heitz, announcer of CCA home games for 30 years and a former Hall of Fame librarian, lives in Fly Creek.

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