Kingsport Wins Back to Back State Championships

 

1946 DOUGLASS HIGH CHAMPIONS

The players are, left to right, front row, Bobbie Joe Johnson, Rush Allen, Weldon Brown, Johnny Johnson, Thomas Bonds. Back row: Ralph Banner, Vernell Allen, Grant Banner, Bobby Graves and Coach C. C. Kizer. (From the 1946 Cherokee, local Kingsport sports magazine.)

The talk in high school basketball circles in Tennessee this week is: Can Kingsport do something it has never done, win back-to-back state championships?

Which is based on a false premise.

If you ask - Can Dobyns-Bennett do something it has never done, win back-to-back state basketball  championships – then the question is correct. Dobyns-Bennett has never won back-to-back state high school basketball championships.

But Kingsport? Kingsport did it before.

In 1945 Kingsport Dobyns-Bennett won the state tournament.

And in 1946 Kingsport Douglass, the city’s black high school, won the state tournament.

 

In the nineteen forties Kingsport had two high schools and they were only five blocks apart.

Both fielded championship-caliber athletic teams.

In 1945 one won the Tennessee State basketball championship.

In 1946 the other won the Tennessee State basketball championship.

But they never played each other.

One was Dobyns-Bennett on Wateree.

The other was Douglass, five blocks away on Walnut (now East Sevier).

They didn’t play each other because it was the era of segregation.

It would be a decade before Brown vs. Board of Education and 20 years before the walls of segregation in Kingsport came completely down.

Douglass, Kingsport’s black school, closed in 1966.

I was reminded of this dichotomy last year when Dobyns-Bennett defeated Knoxville’s Bearden High for the boys’ state basketball championship.

The TV announcers kept referring to Kingsport’s 77-year drought when it came to state basketball championships.

And I wanted to yell at the screen – but I learned long ago it doesn’t do any good to yell at the TV screen – that it was not a 77-year-drought. It was a 76-year drought.

 

It was the first week in March 1946. Dobyns-Bennett had just been knocked out of the regional basketball tournament by Friendsville so the eyes of Kingsport basketball fans turned to the scrappy bunch from Douglass High.

Hearing into March of 1946, the Big Tiger, as the Kingsport Times called the Douglass team, was on a roll. The team had won the Appalachian tournament in Bristol and the Regional tournament in Knoxville and was heading to Nashville to take on Fayette County Training School in the first round of the Tennessee Negro High School championship.

The Tigers were led by Vernell Allen, nephew of Douglass principal Van Dobbins, and a recent arrival in Kingsport. Vernell’s father had died the previous summer and Vernell, his mother and his two sisters came to Kingsport to live with the Dobbins family.

That Douglass squad was not a big team. Allen was only 5’7”; his running mate at guard, Wendell Brown, was also 5’7”. The tallest starter was center Wallace Blye at an even 6 feet; forward Dearmond Blye, Wallace’s brother, was 5’8” and the other forward, Andy Watterson, was 5’10”. The team had height on the bench in 6’5” Bobby Graves and 6’3” Grant Banner but only Banner got many minutes. (Bobby Graves played end and fullback on the football team; at 6-5 and 227 he had intriguing size but he was only 14 when the 1946 basketball season started. He would go on to star on Douglass’s football and basketball teams, leading them back to the state tournament the next three years.)

The Douglass coach in 1946 was Charles “C.C.” Kinzer, a strict disciplinarian, who also coached the Douglass football team.

1982 photo front Andy Watterson and Grant Banner, back Dearmond Blye and Bobby Joe Johnson.

At a 1982 reunion of that championship squad, reserve guard Bobby Joe Johnson remembered, “Coach Kizer demanded perfection.”

Thomas Bond, a freshman reserve on the state championship team, said Coach Kizer conducted practices and coached games the same way he taught class. “Coach Kizer carried a paddle with him. He would put the wood to any player during a game if his performance wasn’t up to par. He didn’t wait to do it in the dressing room. He used that board on players right there in front of the crowd. There was no clowning around; our team was serious-minded every time we went out to play.”

Johnson, who was quarterback on the football team, added, “One night we were leading a team from Virginia, 50-6, at halftime - he took us to the dressing room and paddled a bunch of us. He said we should’ve had 70 points on the scoreboard.”

1946 was before the jump shot and Douglass scored mostly on layups and set shots. But the Tigers did fast-break at every opportunity.

The Tigers’ home gym was compact – they called it a “bandbox” - and an aggressive full-court press was their favorite weapon. “The gym had a low ceiling,” said Bobby Joe Johnson, “and was hard for opponents to adjust to. We didn’t lose many there.”

In the 1946 season they didn’t lose any there. They were 21-5 going into the conference tournament. It was the newly formed Appalachian Regional Athletic Conference with Slater of Bristol, Tennessee, Douglass of Bristol, Virginia, Langston of Johnson City, Appalachia of Virginia and Kingsport Douglass with the regional tournament games played in Slater’s gym.

Vernell Allen was back in Kingsport in 2010 and he told me how he was immediately indoctrinated in the Dobbins ethic: “to stay out of trouble, to be a positive example to the other Douglass students, and to excel at everything thing you do.”

And he did, especially the excel part.

Allen was named to the All-State team and was also named the tournament’s Most Valuable Player. He had averaged 12 points a game over the season.

That 1946 Douglass team didn’t excel at first that season. It had been slow to jell, probably due to integrating a new player – Allen – into an established squad. They lost four of their first ten games and certainly didn’t look like a district champ, much less a contender for a state title.

The team seemed to turn its season around in late January when it got revenge – and how – for an earlier loss, pounding Bristol (Tennessee) Slater 54-8. That began a string of 12 wins, including a convincing 45-35 victory over traditional power Alcoa Hall High. A close loss to Bristol (Virginia) Douglass was followed by a six-game winning streak.

In the opening round of the state tournament Douglass defeated Fayette County Training School 37-26. The Big Tiger faced Clarksville Burt in the semifinals, winning 26-20.

The final was held on March 9, 1946, pairing Kingsport with Woodstock Training School of Shelby County. Coach Kizer played his starting lineup the entire game. Douglass led from the opening horn, winning the Tennessee state championship by a score of 32-26.

Wallace Blye was the leading scorer with 13 points. His brother Dearmond added seven. Vernell Allen finished with 10 points.

But the Tigers season wasn’t over.

In 1946 the athletic director at Tennessee A&I State College – as Tennessee State was known then - had created the National Negro High School Basketball Tournament to decide a national champion for all-black schools.

Kingsport’s Douglass was invited to represent the state of Tennessee. The 16-team tournament included teams from Florida, Texas, Kansas, Arkansas, Kentucky, Virginia, and the defending champion, Oklahoma City Douglass, which was placed in the same bracket with the Kingsport squad.

Kingsport Douglass Coach Charles “C.C.” Kizer took a ten man squad to Nashville:

Vernell Allen, Grant Banner, Ralph Banner, DeArmond Blye, Wallace Blye, Wendell Brown, Bobby Graves, Bobby Joe Johnson, Johnny Johnson and Andy Watterson,

Bobby Joe told me in 2010, “We thought we were good. Till we got to the national tournament.”

They faced St. Louis Vashon High in the first round.

The Kingsport Times story told the tale. “The Tigers could not match the smooth-working St. Louis club, and fell behind early.”

The final was 41-17, dropping Douglass into the losers’ bracket, where they faced the defending national champs.

It was the same story. Oklahoma City raced out to a big lead and won 34-18.

Two days later Booker T. Washington of Cushing, Oklahoma defeated Middleton High of Tampa, Florida 44-40 for the national title.

But the story doesn’t end there.

The trip gave Vernell Allen exposure to the Tennessee A&I staff, who offered him a basketball scholarship. After graduating with a degree in education in 1950, he taught in Shelby County for three years then moved to Michigan to work on his master’s degree at Wayne State.

He and his sister Augusta were featured in a 1955 Kingsport Times-News story about distinguished Douglass graduates. “Augusta and Vernell were outstanding students at Tennessee State. She is now teaching English in Lexington, Tennessee.” The story noted that while working on his master’s, Vernell had a “recreational job that pays $3,600 a year.” That was a nice salary in 1955, especially for a student working on a degree. He received his master’s in education in 1958 and spent his career as an educator in Detroit.

 

So Kingsport has won back-to-back state championships: one by Dobyns-Bennett, the other by Douglass.

Kingsport goes for back-to-back titles again on Wednesday March 15 at 12:30 p.m. against Memphis East.

UPDATE: There will be no back-to-back this time. Memphis East defeated Dobyns-Bennett 60-51. D-B led 31-28 at the half.