Welcome to the opening tip here at HoopU.com of CENTAUR SEASONS, a “memory blog” of my years playing basketball for Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales in Center Valley, Pennsylvania.
This post can also be viewed at CENTAUR SEASONS.
Today I attempt to explain why we Centaurs went to Allentown College in the first place, and why we played basketball for a brand-new school that seemingly had so little to offer.
These days, to get to DeSales University, you need first to get to the intersection of 309 and 378 in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. Head east on 378 to the first traffic light, then turn right onto Preston Road. In a minute or two a brick gate on either side will welcome you to De Sales University. On your right: Joseph J. Billera Hall and the John Compardo Recreation Center.
Drive to the perpendicular, to Landis Mill Road. Directly in front stands a sign with an arrow pointing left toperhaps a dozen campus locations, another pointing right to a second dozen up Landis Mill and left onto Station Avenue. Behind that sign sits the campus itself, a goodly collection of brick buildings, across the valley and up the hills, in all its greensward glory.
It was not always thus.
When I arrived at Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales, there were five brick buildings, total. We got to the place by whipping a right off 309 — easy to miss — onto Station Avenue. Over an ancient stone bridge, over railroad tracks, through Center Valley to Landis Mill, where a small sign identified Billera Hall as that low-slung thing off to the left. The school proper was still a half mile away, over the hill and around a winding Station Ave.
What you could see were cornfields, plenty of cornfields. Any indication that a brand-new, Catholic liberal arts college was somewhere in the vicinity demanded an act of complete faith.
Wait. When I got there in, September 1970, Allentown College of St. Francis De Sales was already five years old. I would be in the sixth graduating class. I played on Centaur teams No. 4 through 7.
We need to go back to the school’s first class, the class of 1969, the Original Centaurs. Whatever faith I brought to or found in the valley — that the school could prevail, the basketball team succeed — I learned in passed-down-stories from that first class of 156 guys who pushed open the doors on September 22, 1965, the school’s two building so new they squeaked. (Just days before, the Oblate faculty had doubled as carpet installers.)
You want faith? Listen to an Original Centaur.
“Here’s the story I always tell,” says Jim Van Horn. Jim played schoolboy ball at Catasaqua High in eastern Pennsylvania, making it to a state quarterfinals. Teammate and friend Larry Miller went on to the University of North Carolina and a seven-year ABA career. Meanwhile, Jim in effect was recruited by UNC coach Dean Smith to play for a coaching friend of the hoops legend, at a small college also in the Tar Heel State.
Once at college, however, Jim blew out his knee before Thanksgiving. While the school was prepared to honor his scholarship, Jim decide to head home and start over. Thus in the spring of 1965 did he visit this new Catholic college in eastern Pennsylvania over the hill from the 309-378 crossroad, alleged to be opening come September.
“We were in the Brown Farm House with Fr. Paul, the admissions director, looking out into the valley where the school was going to be,” Jim remembers. “I think Wills Hall [the priests’ residence] was built and the academic building was being built. That was it.” The rest was holes in the grounds or nothing at all.
“Brown Farm House has a bay window and we’re looking out and Fr. Paul is saying, Here is where they’re going to build this building, and this one over here and this one and this one.”
That farmhouse still stands. Look out that window today and you’ll see a gleaming glass-walled university center … … a science center … … a library. Up the far hill rises yet another new facility, still being built, grandest of them all.
But back then everything was covered in cornfields or still unearthed.
“I looked at him,” says Jim. Remember, he says, he was just a few months removed from an established, quality basketball program at a school that was maybe one hundred years old.
“And then Fr. Paul said, ‘Believe …’
And I said, ‘Okay!’ ”
As did the rest of us when arrived in the valley. Standing in for the fact that there was no school was our belief that there actually was – we could see it; it mattered little if no one else could — and by believing in it we could make it come to be.
“Allentown College defied logic,” Jim says now, looking back then. He speaks with authority. Jim played some on the first collegiate Centaur team, in 1968-69, and five years later, during my senior year, he returned as an assistant coach. His influence on me was and is profound.
“As adults today, thinking in a mature, logical way, you’d NEVER go there!,” Jim says, almost laughing at the thought. “If someone said to you: ‘Here’s a start-up school with just a couple of buildings and it’s not accredited yet and it’s all male and there’s only going to be 156 people in the place?’ ”
No way, Jose – which might have been what we said in 1965.
“I still believe this to this day: It doesn’t matter where you go to school. It’s the people you were involved with, it’s the experience that’s going to last in your mind. It’s not going to matter if you went to Penn or Princeton. And I think that’s the way I looked at it even when I was there. They were starting a program and there was always talk of where it was going. There was pride in that.”
Like Father Paul asked: “Believe …”
Like Jim answered: “Okay!”
CENTAUR SEASONS can also be found at www.centaurseasons.com. The centerpiece will be the posting in "real time" of the diary that Steve kept of his 1972-1973 junior-year season, beginning on November 30. Prior to that (and after), Steve will be posting regularly about his freshman, sophomore and senior seasons, as well as about what it was like to be there at the beginning to help get a struggling college basketball program off the ground.
Steve was the original writer of The Wall Street Journal's popular sports blog, "The Daily Fix" in 2001-2002, and was even dubbed "The Unwitting Father of the Sports Blog" by Gelf Magazine, the online publication of the "Varsity Letters Reading Series. Steve was the Journal's sports editor for its original Weekend sport section and was involved in all of the Journal's Olympics coverage, Winter and Summer, from 1996 through 2008.
He is the author of three books, most recently "My Father's Heart: A Son's Reckoning With the Legacy of Heart Disease," which he is adapting as a one-man show. For his first book, "The Call of the Game," Steve traveled the country in search of sports events -- including the famous N.C. State Wolfpack victory over "Phi Slamma Jamma" of the University of Houston. For his second book, COACH, among the 150+ coaches Steve interviewed are/were college basketball coaches John Wooden (UCLA), Pat Summitt (Tennessee), Frank Layden (Niagara), Bobby Cremins (Georgia Tech), P.J. Carlesimo (Seton Hall), Bill Guthridge (North Carolina), Abe Lemons (Texas), Stan Morrison (USC), Kathy Rush (Immaculata), Jim Satalin (Duquesne), Charlie Thomas (San Francisco State), Butch Van Bredda Koff (Princeton), Bill Whitmore (Vermont) and LaDonna Wilson (Austin Peay).
For more, you can click on www.steve-mckee.com, where you can find a TODAY show appearance and an NPR interview.
- CENTAUR SEASONS: A new Inductee to the DeSales University Hall of Fame recognizes the contributions of the school’s orginal athletes … - September 18, 2013
- CENTAUR (OFF) SEASONS: A dozen ways to read the 97 posts in the scorebook thus far — until a new roster begins taking the floor in the fall - June 13, 2013
- CENTAUR SEASONS: In a ‘Carnival of Opportunity,’ One of Our Own Shines in an All-Star Game - May 14, 2013
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