The Legend of Whitburn County

I just want to go on record right now, in front of God and everybody, that I never, ever planned it to wind up the way it did. Things just happened.

In the end, though, I'm glad it all worked out.

See, Jared and I always wanted to play basketball. He was too skinny and I was too short for football, and neither one of us could throw or hit or run very well to play baseball or track.

There were endless nights playing half-court in the driveway of Jared's family farm, shooting hoops until his mom finally flashed the outside light to let him know it was time to come in. I would take a last shot, he'd grab the rebound and score. We'd say our good-byes, then I'd walk down that driveway, cross over State Highway 58, and then take the slow walk up to our farmhouse on the other side.

That was how we grew up. We did that for years and years. Then, when I was in eighth grade, things started to change. And the next five years of my life would be completely different.

The first thing that happened was the farm. My mom had died a few years before, and my dad had to sell off some of our cattle to make ends meet. Jared's parents had helped out in that respect. However, two things happened simultaneously (almost, I don't know which happened first): my dad met Mary Lee, and we started having flooding problems on the farm.

Mary Lee lived in the city of Whitburn. Whitburn was the county seat of (surprise, surprise) Whitburn County, but in realistic terms, it wasn't much of a city. If I remember my civics courses right, Whitburn had a population in the last census of 8,343. It was the largest city in the county, mostly because Whitburn County had only 28,000 or so people in the entire county. Anyway, my dad fell in love with Mary Lee, and they were married in our equipment shed (basically, a barn with aluminum siding and a concrete slab that could house three tractors and a combine).

We were going to have the wedding outside on the side lawn, but in late April we had an absolutely torrential downpour that flooded part of our planting area and the entire side lawn. After it had dried up a bit, we discovered that the rain had eroded part of the soil in the one part of the crops, and had actually opened an underground spring. Pretty soon, a good twenty percent of our farm was a huge pond.

The problem with the flooding led to an obvious decision: We were going to have to sell the farm. My dad sat down with me, explained what was happening, why we had to do this, and all the reasons why it was going to be all right. We would move to Whitburn with Mary Lee, who owned a house given to her by her parents, the old family homestead.

It wasn't bad living in Whitburn - a lot of my friends lived in Whitburn, actually, and it was a really nice house - but it was the other thing that happened that really affected me.

You see, the entire county is one large school district. There are four different elementary schools, Kindergarten through 8th grade, and then there were two High Schools. One was for the southern part of the county (Thompsonville High School, the "Fightin' Tigers"), the other was for the northern part of the county (Whitburn High School, the "Panthers"). They always were a little loose on which school you went to, though. The rules stated that wherever you went to elementary school for eighth grade was where you'd go to High School. Jared and I both went to Plainview Elementary, located in Plainview (which was exactly halfway between Whitburn and Thompsonville).

My dad knew I wanted to still go to Plainview, so I could go to Thompsonville High with Jared. I still was enrolled at Plainview, and because of the rules, I'd have to stay where I was, or I'd end up going to Whitburn. So we worked out this arrangement with Jared's parents where I'd stay with them during the week, help out with chores and what not, and on the weekends I'd go up to Whitburn and stay at Mary Lee's house.

It actually wasn't a bad situation, since Jared and I were playing eighth-grade basketball for Plainview, and it gave me a "break-in" period with Mary Lee. By the time the school year ended, I was comfortable with my new step-mom, and actually looked forward to moving in to the house full-time. Mary Lee's daughter, Luann, was amiable and outgoing, and we grew close over the next few years.

My dad managed to get the farm sold the first week in September, exactly three months after he got remarried. We had a big moving day, and Jared helped me move my stuff in to his family's back bedroom, and then he and his dad helped us move our stuff up to Whitburn. It was a beautiful day, right in the middle of Indian Summer, and everything looked like it was going to be all right.

Or so we thought.

Now, I'll admit that I didn't hear much about what was going on with the Whitburn School District. I knew that they were building a second campus, right next to the existing Whitburn High School building. And I kinda knew that Thompsonville High was dwindling in numbers, but Thompsonville had always been the smaller of the two county high schools.

I'd only been staying with Jared's family for a few weeks when his dad told me that there was a big school board meeting scheduled for the first week in October. The board had a new chairman - Mark Petroski - who had gone to Morgantown State University, the biggest college in the state, for his Ph.D. in Education. He had all these ideas on how to improve things, and finally, in the last round of School Board elections, he had managed to get elected to the chair. The old school board chairman, Christian Wilson, had died of a heart attack after serving on the board for something like 40 years.

Everyone thought that the big school board meeting was going to be about renaming the elementary school in Whitburn after Wilson. My mom had been good friends with Mr. Wilson, and had even worked under him when he was both school board chair and principal of Whitburn Elementary.

What actually happened was a shock. I watched it at Jared's house on the cable access channel. Petroski opened the meeting by making a statement that there were going to be some changes in how the school district was going to operate. First, he said, he had found a way to pay for the cost of the new addition to Whitburn High, and still have finances left over to keep the district well in the black financially.

This was greeted by applause, since the district had always been close to the financial edge for the last several years. When he explained how he had done it, thought, the applause turned to shocked gasps.

"The District," he stated, "has entered into an agreement with the Diocese of St. George's Catholic Church in Thompsonville, and with Riverton Developments, to sell the buildings and land of Thompsonville High School. The original main building of Thompsonville High will be sold to St. George's, for the purpose of opening a Catholic School; the newer building will be sold to Riverton Developments for the purpose of building a retail and office center."

Then Petroski dropped the bombshell - "Since Whitburn High School will have double the capacity for the next school year, all students grades 9 through 12 in Whitburn County will go to Whitburn High, starting the next academic year."

"WHAT???" screamed Jared's dad at the TV set. Jared and I just exchanged blank looks.

Petroski, oblivious of Jared's dad's ranting, presented the proposal to the board. Then, one of the other members - I think he was the financial officer - called for a vote on the proposal. There was a massive outcry from those observing the meeting in Whitburn. The voice vote on the issue, not surprisingly, was 5-4 in favor. All five votes for the measure were from Whitburn-based board members; the other four were from Thompsonville.

"So approved," Petroski gaveled on the table. "The proposal will be put forth on the November ballot for final approval by the entire school district."

And then, after all the noise had died down, did he announce that the Whitburn Elementary School would be renamed for Wilson.

Jared's dad went ballistic. He started cursing left and right at Petroski.

He had a good reason to curse. See, something I didn't tell you about Jared - his last name is Thompson. His great-great-grandfather was the man who Thompsonville is named for. His great-grandfather was the mayor who built Thompsonville High School. And his uncle was the current mayor of the city (his grandfather never went into politics - he was a farmer whose land Jared and his parents lived on today).

When the phone rang, Jared knew instantly who it was. "Uncle Jerry," he said without missing a beat as he grabbed his coat and a basketball. He motioned for me to come with outside - he knew that we wouldn't want to hear all the cursing and swearing.

Jared's dad and his uncle talked on the phone for a long time. I know they were, because when we came back in, he was just hanging up the phone.

"It's settled," his dad told Jared. "If this measure passes, you're going to St. George's School."

I asked him if he knew whether or not the measure would pass.

"It'll pass," he said bluntly. "There's too many people in Whitburn who would rather consolidate the entire school district instead of paying to send half the county to a smaller high school." He sighed and shook his head. "We'll talk about it more in the morning, Jared. Why don't you and Billy get your homework done."

As the weeks went on, it was clear that Jared's dad was right. Too many people in the northern part of the county wanted the cost reductions; a poll by the Whitburn Intelligencer projected the measure to pass with a 60 percent approval. It wasn't quite that big. The measure was passed by about 3,000 votes, with the approval only topping 9,000 votes.

But it was settled. Thompsonville High would no longer be a public high school. Saint George's, which to that point had run a small elementary school out of their parish hall, would actually have room to expand their classes.

The change was going to affect a lot of things - most of all, the Northern Lakes Athletic Conference. The conference was an eight-team conglomerate of high schools from the four counties around Whitburn - Woodfield (Woodfield and Newsburg), Shoreland (Shoreland and Oxford Lakes), Chemequon, and Marshall. The Conference was aligned with the state High School Athletic Association, which was strictly for the public schools in the state. Private schools were in the Inter-Scholastic Athletic Association.

In December, just as we were starting our eighth-grade basketball season, the ISAA and HSAA came to an agreement to allow the Northern Lakes Conference to keep St. George's as a member. It made sense, since there was only one other private school in the five-county area - St. Michael's in Woodfield, which was a good two hour drive away, and they didn't have an athletic program. The ISAA announced that the new school would only be allowed to play in their state tournament if they qualified for the conference tournament. The HSAA, however, stated that if St. George's qualified for the Northern Lakes Conference tournament, they would not be allowed to play, since the winner of the tournament automatically would advance to the HSAA state tournament.

Jared's dad still was insisting that he'd be going to St. George's. For the first time since we were in first grade, we'd be going to separate schools. At the end of the school year, I was going to move up to Whitburn with my Dad and my step-sister Luann.

I was feeling sad about it, but Luann (who was two years older than me) agreed to drive me down to see Jared on a regular basis. I found out later that Luann actually had a crush on Jared's older brother, Jerry - something that was confirmed when they got married after I graduated from Whitburn.

Basketball was a pleasant distraction during this tumultuous time in my life. It was basketball that had helped me through the pain of losing my mom years ago, and it helped me again in this whole whirlwind of changes. But there was something that I noticed as I played endless one-on-ones with Jared - he was getting better and stronger and faster.

The year my mom died, I had a decided advantage on him in ability. I could shoot; he couldn't. I could hit those outside jumpers, where he was having trouble laying it in on me. He kept working, though. When we played a pickup game with me and a few of my cousins before the wedding, he put moves on me that were just incredible. He head faked, drove, pulled up and put a little jumper right in, nothing but net. He did a few other things to me, like nailing an outside 20-footer, even hooking one right over me. Now, I knew he'd grown faster than me (he was already 5-foot-11 when we entered eighth grade; I was only 5-4 on a good day), but he finally realized that he could outmaneuver me. My cousins were making comments, like, "Billy, I thought you were a better player than this!" And "Jeez, Billy, where'd you find this guy, the NBA?"

I didn't think much of that game until Jared, Jerry and I entered in this three-on-three tournament down at Lakeside. Lakeside Tech was a NCAA Division II school that was big for its basketball, and they were sponsoring this tournament. The premise was that Jerry (who was going to be a senior at the new St. George's High that year) was going down to Lakeside Tech to check out the campus, since Jerry wasn't a bad basketball player himself. Jerry also knew we'd be able to test ourselves against other players throughout the state.

Jared and I were the youngest kids in that tournament. The bracket we were in was open to anyone 14-18 who lived in the state, and there were some kids who played for the best teams in the HSAA. We took them all on, and kept winning and winning and winning. Finally, we went up against the only other undefeated team in the bracket, a threesome from Riverton (the largest city in the state) with two players from Riverton North and a kid who was the only other kid close to our age - Mitch Jordan. The two older kids would end up going to Morgan State University (the NCAA Division I powerhouse in the state). In that game, though, we just demolished them. They kept waiting for Jared to dish the ball off to Jerry inside, leaving him wide open at the three-point arc. He nailed about three treys before they started getting in his face. Then he just started dishing it to me and to Jerry, and pretty soon we were up by about a dozen. We won the game, then defeated the winner of the consolation bracket game to take the tournament title. One of the organizers was the head coach of the Lakeside Tech basketball team, and he asked Jared how old he was. When he told him he was only 14, the coach's eyes popped open wide.

"Kid, keep your grades up," he told him. "You keep playing like that, and we'll definitely find you a place at Lakeside Tech."

Jerry told me later that while he was talking to the coach about possibly coming to LTU, he kept saying, "That brother of yours could start for me right now. That's how good he is."

My freshman year at Whitburn was interesting, to say the least. Some of the classrooms in the new building hadn't been completely finished when we started school in late August, so I had some of my classes in the cafeteria. They sectioned off parts of the cafeteria with these cubicle-type walls, and you'd hear one class talking about algebra and equations while another class was talking about the Punic Wars - and yet another class was listening to a French-speaking lesson from a videotape. It was distracting, to say the least.

Making the basketball team looked like it was going to be hard sailing - there were at least thirty kids there for the tryouts in late October. Whitburn, however, had lost five seniors to graduation, and two of the junior players from last year were academically ineligible after flunking two classes last year. That left the head coach, Roger Mason with one senior, one junior and four sophomores with a total number of seven games played between all of them. The JV was even worse - all of the players on the team had been freshmen, and they went 0-14 on the season. Half of the JV from last year weren't coming back (some of them because they just couldn't, or didn't want to, play). So there we all were, thirty guys wanting to take 13 spots on the JV and varsity roster.

Half of the players were from Thompsonville, who had maybe one decent player and a lot of so-so players. Thompsonville hadn't played in the Northern Lakes tournament in over a decade, and last year had only two wins on the season - one against a non-conference team from Oxford Falls, and the other against Whitburn.

During the tryouts, I made a good impression on the coach by nailing a few treys and doing some quality driving down the lane. I even tried to dish a few passes out for shots, but the guys on the receiving end either dropped the ball or missed the jumpers. At the end of the tryout, he rattled off the names of 15 guys who would be back for varsity practice on Friday. I was on that list.

I was so excited, I talked about it all the way home with Luann. She was happy for me, and so were dad and Mary Lee. After dinner, I called up Jared and told him the news. He wasn't as happy, though.

"You remember we thought Coach Halvorsen was going to stay on as the coach here at Thom... Saint George's?" he told me over the phone. "Well, turns out Halvorsen only stayed on to collect his pension. The team's going to be coached by some guy named MacGwire. He's got a policy that says no underclassmen will play on the varsity team."

MacGwire, apparently, didn't know his head from his posterior region. Jared tried his best to show off his talents during the drills, but after MacGwire laid down his policy about underclassmen before even starting the tryouts, Jared's heart wasn't exactly in it.

"He didn't want me to come back for practice, but he only had 21 kids there, besides me," he told me. He told me that I had to improve my game if I wanted to play. Improve my play! This guy never saw me play, dammit! He doesn't know crap about anything. I asked him if he'd seen any of the YMCA 8th grade league games in Thompsonville - he didn't even realize there was a YMCA league!

Jared and I had played in the YMCA boys 8th grade league. There was no state-wide association for elementary school basketball, so we had to play in the Thompsonville YMCA league. Jared had just torn things up on occasion - I seem to recall a 50-point night once - and Halvorsen had seen it and liked what he saw in Jared.

We found out later that Halvorsen was forced out as coach at the new Saint George's for one very significant reason - he wasn't Catholic. Shaun MacGwire was not only Catholic, but he was a Notre Dame graduate, with a Masters Degree in Coaching. He probably was looking to eventually take on a coaching job at St. Mary's Immaculate University in Riverton, if their coach (Roger Mayers) ever retired. He didn't have time for a kid's league in a podunk town.

Jared was so caught up in his furor over MacGwire that he never did ask me how I did in my tryouts. It's a good thing; he probably would have never spoken to me again if he had found out just then.

I managed to stick with the Whitburn varsity as a freshman, but I didn't really get into a whole lot of games. The varsity had gone 10-10 the year before, but we were going to be lucky if we won four games this year. We won two non-conference games, one with Oxford Falls and another with Washura. Washura had a two-hour bus trip, and were physically wiped when we whipped them, 85-14. Unfortunately, it was something they wouldn't forget when they beat us at their fieldhouse the next week... and the next six games we played against them...). We hit the conference schedule, and couldn't buy a win. MacGwire refused to schedule Whitburn until March, for some slightly irrational reason, so we played everyone else in the Northern Lakes conference - and lost. By the time we faced the St. George's varsity, we were 2-16, and in last place in the conference.