Sinclair Community College
A recently Fish Report article was about a girl from Covington signing to play basketball with Sinclair Community College, which brought back recollections about my basketball playing career at Sinclair. So I went on-line and found the photograph above of Sinclair’s current team. As shown above, their record is 14-13.
With little money after graduating from high school, I started working on the night shift at Frigidaire in Dayton while attending Sinclair during the day at the old Dayton YMCA building, squeezing in basketball practice after my classes before going to work on the washing machine assembly line. Because of having the lowest seniority, I was assigned the worst job, loading the 50 pound tubs into the washers at the rate of about 1 per minute. The good news it helped my strength and endurance for basketball.
Fortunately, all of Sinclair's basketball games were on the weekend, several times playing other community colleges in Kentucky and Tennessee. The long bus rides to those games were fun since the cheerleaders came along with us. My appreciation for cheerleaders back then was well documented in this previous blog.
Our team had several African American players, so whenever we went to those Appalachian schools, many times the opponents and their fans reacted poorly towards those players. Such behavior really upset us and provided extra motivation for our team; literally every time leading us to a blowout win. Fortunately we never faced the likes of those type of fans and opponents when playing local teams in Ohio; otherwise, we’d have gone undefeated! As it was, if memory serves, our record was something like 12-7.
That season represented the start as well as the end of my college basketball career, as I subsequently was accepted at General Motors Institute as described in this previous blogpost. They had no basketball team but fortunately had great professors!
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