The First and Only Time They Held the State Basketball Tournament in Kingsport

 

STATE TOURNAMENT HELD IN D-B GYM IN 1938!

1926 photo of new Dobyns-Bennett High School. Gym is on far end. 

When Coach Wilkes told us, nobody believed him.

It was the winter of 1963 and the B-team was in the middle of one of our endless practices in the “old gym” at Dobyns-Bennett High School in Kingsport, Tennesssee. At the time we called it the “Old Gym” because it was the original gym, replaced in 1950 by the new Sprankle Gym. It was also called the “Girls’ Gym” because that’s where girls’ gym classes were held.

Coach Wilkes asked if we knew that they had held the state tournament in this gym years earlier. No one believed him. They would never hold the Tennessee State Basketball Tournament in this bandbox of a gym.

I don’t think he ever brought it up again and I hadn’t thought of it until I ran across this headline in an old issue of the Kingsport Times:

Tennessee Cage Tournament Is Awarded Kingsport

It was a banner headline all the way across the top of the Sunday Sports Section of the Feb. 6, 1938 Kingsport Times.

1938!

Twenty-five years before that long ago conversation with Coach Wilkes, the state tournament was held in Kingsport.

At that time it was Dobyns-Bennett’s only gymnasium; it would be another twelve years before Sprankle Gym was added.

Dobyns-Bennett has had three gymnasiums since the school was first built in 1926 and that old “girls’ gym” would seem the least likely to host a state tournament.

The current facility, the Buck Van Huss Dome, seats 5,500 for basketball. Its predecessor, Sprankle Gym, held, 2,000 spectators. The D-B Gym, it’s official name in 1938, accommodated only 650. The court was only 75 feet long compared to Sprankle’s 84 feet. A state tournament in that?

It was a different time.

 

Before there was the D-B Dome, there was Sprankle Gym. And before there was Sprankle Gym, there was the D-B Gym.

For my generation, Sprankle was the heartbeat of the school, not just a basketball arena, but a place to gather before school and at lunchtime, a place for baccalaureate and commencement exercises, a sanctuary for our weekly Monday morning devotionals featuring a rotating cast of local ministers.

But Sprankle only served D-B’s needs for 17 years, replaced in 1967 by a new arena – the D-B Dome – and a new school building. The Buck Van Huss Dome, as it is now known, has been home to D-B basketball for 59 years!

In fact Sprankle was D-B’s basketball gym for less time than its namesake served as D-B’s basketball coach (LeRoy Sprankle was coach for 21 years, 1922-1943). It was the school gym for a shorter period of time than the original D-B gym which was in use from the time Dobyns-Bennett opened its doors in 1926, replacing Kingsport Central High School (which my generation knows as Washington Elementary) until Sprankle Gym opened in 1950, a total of 24 years.

The D-B Dome seats 5,500 for basketball. Sprankle Gym held 2,000. And yet neither was ever home to the Tennessee State Basketball Tournament.

The old “Girls’ Gym” was!

What? Yes!

A little band box like that was home to the State Tournament. (When I was in high school, the State Tournament was staged annually in Vanderbilt’s Memorial Gym, which seated 6.583. My senior year it moved to the new Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis, seating capacity 11,200.)

But it was.

Knoxville High Trojans (in dark jerseys) take on Nashville Isaac Litton in 1938 State Tournament in D-B Gym. Knoxville won 36-34.

How did Kingsport get the state tournament?

The state tournament was first held in 1921, co-sponsored by Vanderbilt and the Nashville Tennessean newspaper and held in Vanderbilt’s gym. (There were 14 entrants, two from East Tennessee – Chattanooga Central and Knoxville - and the winner was Nashville’s Hume-Fogg High.) The tournament was an annual event until it wasn’t, falling victim to squabbling between the public schools and private academies.

The two groups finally patched things up and as Kingsport Times sports editor Frank Rule noted in a March 1938 column:

“Last year, in the first state tournament in more than a score of years, Tennessee High (of Bristol) captured the meet, bringing the title to upper East Tennessee.”

That first state tournament in a dozen years was held in Milan, population 3,035. Milan was in west Tennessee, 100 miles northeast of Memphis and 140 miles west of Nashville. And 400 miles from Kingsport.

After the Milan event the TSSAA, the governing board of high school sports, decided to hold the tournament in the three sections of the state in rotation with East Tennessee selected for the ’38 event.

But where in East Tennessee?

The Nashville Tennessean reported, “The state basketball tournament will be staged the week ending March 19 in some city in East Tennessee to be designated by the East Tennessee board of control, which will act as a tournament committee.”

The University of Tennessee submitted a bid to hold the tournament in its Jefferson Hall and most - particularly the Knoxville sportswriters - just assumed UT would get the event.

In fact to them it wasn’t just an assumption, it was a fact. On March 21, 1937, the Knoxville News-Sentinel ran this headline:

’38 Hoop Meet At U-T

State Basketball Tournament Will Be Played In University Gymnasium, TSSAA Head Reveals.

“The Tennessee state basketball tournament will be held at the University of Tennessee next year, The News-Sentinel learned Saturday in a long-distance telephone conversation with S. E. Nelson of Chattanooga, who is chairman of the TSSAA board of control. Mr. Nelson said that this had not been decided recently but was worked out two months or so ago when it was decided to revive the state meet.”

But then ten months later, the committee met.

As reported in the Feb. 6, 1938 Knoxville Journal, "The attitude of the TSSAA is that since the high schools supply the teams, and the meets are for their benefit, they should be held in high school gyms," declared President V.F. Goddard of Aloca. "Therefore, the board selected Kingsport High school, which has all the facilities for a successful state meet.”

That band box had all the facilities? It must have been a low bar.

So it was that the headline in the Feb. 6 Kingsport Times read: Tennessee Cage Tournament Is Awarded Kingsport.

“The state high school boys' basketball tournament will be played in Kingsport on March 17, 18 and 19, according to an announcement by C. K. Koffman, principal of Dobyns-Bennett high school and member of the East Tennessee Board of Directors of the Tennessee Secondary Schools Athletic Association. Decision to hold the state tournament in Kingsport was reached late yesterday during a meeting of the board held in Knoxville. Nine members are included on the board representing East, Middle and West Tennessee.”

The tournament set-up was an unusual, perhaps even clumsy arrangement:

“Eight teams will be invited to participate in the tournament. Three regional tournaments will be held with the winner and runner-up invited to place teams in the state tournament. In addition, two other teams will be invited to take part in the tournament in order to complete the bracket.”

And there was no guarantee that Dobyns-Bennett would be one of the eight.

“Whether Kingsport will be one of the teams representing East Tennessee depends upon its showing during the remainder of the season.

“Two upper East Tennessee teams may be invited to participate in the tournament in order to round out the eight-team bracket provided they continue the pace already set in conference circles. They are Kingsport and Morristown in the Big Six Conference with Blountville standing better than an even chance to be selected by virtue of the team's excellent showing in the upper region of the state.”

As it turned out Kingsport wasn’t selected to play in the state tournament held in its own gym – it lost its final three games of the regular season, sealing its sideline seat. (Milan had been selected to play in the tournament held in is gym the previous year so there was a precedent for inviting the host team.)

Blountville made the tournament, but the rest of upper East Tennessee was shut out.

The final eight teams, in addition to Blountville, were Chattanooga City, Memphis Whitehaven, Nashville Central, Friendsville, Nashville Isaac Litton, Knoxville and Adamsville.

The March 17, 1938 Kingsport Times announced, “Tennessee high school basketball will start its fadeout here today as eight leading teams from every section of the state swarm on Dobyns-Bennett gym in the annual state tournament, the grandest cage exhibition of the year.

Nashville Central (dark jerseys) lost to Friendsville 39-31.

“Tournament officials announced today that the largest crowd in history was expected to attend the games which come to upper East Tennessee this year for the first time.”

How many fans were expected in that bandbox?

Coach Leroy Sprankle, who was in charge of the ticket distribution, told the Times there would be tickets for 250 students and 400 adults.

That’s a total capacity of 650, which by any definition is a “bandbox.”

If you need further proof, when the D-B Gym opened in 1926, the newspaper reported, “The gymnasium is a 72 by 116 foot affair, basketball court being 75 by 50 feet.”

When Sprankle Gym opened it was listed as “100 feet by 60 feet with a full 50 by 84-foot court.”

As for ticket sales, the tickets were originally to be held for D-B students and Kingsport residents. But then D-B didn’t make the tournament, and an early story called turnout “disappointing.”

D-B students congregate in tiny bleacher section of D-B Gym during lunch hour. From 1948 yearbook. 

It was still termed “the most successful tournament every held under TSSAA” by the Times with Memphis Whitehaven, which traveled 540 miles by train to get to Kingsport, defeating the Knoxville Trojans 48-41 for the state championship.

The only state high school basketball championship ever held in Kingsport was won by a team that had endured a 20 hour train ride, changing from the Southern line to the Clinchfield line in Chattanooga.

Since 1973 the State Tournaments (Boys and Girls and the various divisions broken up by school size – it can be as many as 12 separate tournaments) has been held at Middle Tennessee State’s Murphy Center, seating capacity 11,658, court length 94 feet.

That 1938 state tournament in Kingsport really was held in a bandbox.

But the folks from out in the state were still impressed. Fletcher Sweet of the Knoxville Journal wrote, “The state tournament was a pronounced success in every respect, in spite of the fact that no Kingsport team was in the championship contention. Attendance throughout was excellent and Director Koffman said that the management would at least break even on expenses. ‘If we can do that,’ he said,

‘we will feel that the meet has been more than successful, because we were glad to have the event here and we were delighted to bring it to this part of the state.’”

Sweet wrote that officials of the tournament, “Director C. K. Koffman, especially have been expediting the tournament with excellent efficiency. The teams are fed at the high school and quartered in a downtown hotel. (Hopefully the Kingsport Inn and not the Bumstead, er, Homestead Hotel.) Their transportation to the gym is provided.”

 

 

Here’s the yearbook photo of the 1938 Dobyns-Bennett team that didn’t make the state tournament played in its own gym:

 

Front row: Junior Minnich, George Peters, Sam Young, Jack Pectol.

Back row: B. B. Sullivan, Roy Hale, Hugh Blessing, Herman Ellis, Lonzo Barrett.

Coach: LeRoy Sprankle

Manager: John Parker

 

The 1937-1938 D-B team record: 18-12. Kingsport lost its last three games and also lost to the only two eventual tournament teams it played, Knoxville and Chattanooga.

B-team members included future D-B stars John Robert Bell, Lawrence Thayer and Tommy Peters (George Peters’ twin brother.)