John Shearer: Remembering Great Riverside High Basketball Teams, Part 1

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the 1972 state championship won by the boys’ basketball team at Riverside High School, the former school located on 3rd Street where the Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences now is.

 

On March 18 of that year, with Anthony “Woosie” Roberts scoring 24 points, the Trojans beat a familiar foe – rival Howard High – in the finals by a score of 60-53 at Vanderbilt’s Memorial Gymnasium to win its third and final title over a five-year period. 

 

By then, it was a slightly different program, with a young Leroy Alexander serving as the coach after former coach Dorsey Sims Jr.

had moved on to be the head coach at Chattanooga “City” High as part of the city schools’ desegregation plan.

 

But the blue and gold magic remained, and the 1971-72 Trojans finished the season with only one loss, a regular season heartbreaker to Memphis Melrose on what was described as a questionable no call on an apparent foul on Frank Jones. 

 

In the tournament, they more than made up for the disappointment, though.

 

“I had just turned 22 on Feb. 25, and the tournament ended on March 18,” recalled coach Alexander. “I was the youngest coach in the U.S. ever to win a state championship. I couldn’t believe we had done it.”

 

As a two-part look back at some of those Riverside teams from the late 1960s and early 1970s is taken in connection with the anniversary, perhaps it is now more evident that those teams left a bigger legacy than just being good basketball teams.

 

Riverside’s first state championship under coach Sims came in March 1968, just days before the unfortunate assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And the second would come that next year on what was maybe the greatest Riverside team of all.

 

This was not just a tumultuous time in America’s history, but historic all-black high schools had just started playing against white schools by the mid-1960s. As a result, whatever great black athletes or teams local schools Howard High or Booker T. Washington High had before then, most whites hardly took notice due to segregated leagues and less coverage of the black schools in the newspaper.

 

But Riverside’s first two state championships came against almost all other schools as the TSSAA was expanding, and Chattanoogans – all of them -- soon noticed. 

 

Everybody appreciates good and winning basketball locally, and suddenly skin color mattered just a little less as the walls of segregation had mostly been taken down. Much of the city seemed to take pride in the Riverside accomplishments, whether following the team up close or simply through the news reports from a distance.

 

Coach Sims was even named an honorary page by the state House of Representatives in 1968.

 

It was definitely entertaining basketball for Chattanoogans to witness. “They saw a different type of coaching and different style of basketball,” recalled coach Alexander, who had been a star guard for Riverside shortly before the first two state championships.

 

The championships all seemed perhaps a little unlikely – at least beyond the walls of the school -- when Riverside was started as another city school for black students in 1963 to ease overcrowding at Howard. 

 

City High had moved to a new North Chattanooga location where the Center for Creative Arts is now after being located on 3^rd Street since the 1920s in the handsome and classic building designed by noted local architect R.H. Hunt. As a result, the new Riverside was started there.

 

But it was perhaps a later facility – a quality and large gymnasium built in 1954 by Collins and Hobbs and designed by Harrison Gill and Associates for City High – that would aid in the development of the Riverside basketball program.

 

A previous Riverside coach had led the team to a second-place finish in the state in the black schools’ division before leaving for Morris Brown, but the pieces really began falling into place when Dorsey Sims arrived as coach in the fall of 1965. 

 

Originally from Tulsa, Ok., he had played quarterback for Tennessee State and was an outstanding punter, but he did not play basketball in college. 

 

However, he had watched noted Tennessee State basketball coach John McLendon, and he was able to become a winning basketball coach at historic black high schools McReynolds in South Pittsburg beginning in 1958 and Slater at Bristol starting in 1960.

 

According to some information passed along by coach Alexander and the late coach Sims’ son, Dorsey Sims III, longtime Riverside football coach and athletic director Calvin Sorrells had played with him at Tennessee State and hired him as the coach of Riverside.

 

Inspired by the first traditional black school to win a modern Tennessee state championship – Nashville Pearl in 1966 – Riverside in 1967 reached the semifinals of the state tournament before losing to Alcoa at the University of Tennessee’s Stokely Athletic Center in Knoxville.

 

The Trojans then won the state championships the next two years at the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis and Vandy’s Memorial Gym, respectively, in front of crowds that topped more than 10,000 for both finals, with over 11,000 in the second one.

 

In 1968, five years before divisions based on school size would be implemented in the state tournament, Riverside had beaten Johnson City Science Hill, 67-61, in the finals. The Trojans had dodged a scare in the round of 16, when they edged Knoxville Fulton by only two points. They then beat Nashville Stratford by six points in the quarterfinals and Milan of West Tennessee by 11 in the semifinals.

 

In the 1968 championship game, Richard Fuqua scored 21 points, Jesse Traylor and Richard Stone scored 14 points, and Otis McGee chipped in 8.

 

In the 1969 state tournament, Riverside was even better and would go undefeated on its way to being ranked years later as the top state championship team in Tennessee history by MaxPreps. It finished 30-0 and would be a part of a 66-game winning streak the program would enjoy.

 

The team defeated Stratford, 44-39, in the finals after beating Savannah of Hardin County in the round of 16, Lebanon in the quarterfinals, and Memphis Melrose, 75-65, in the semifinals in front of another Nashville crowd of more than 11,000. In the Melrose game, Mr. Fuqua had an amazing 37 points in the days before a 3-point shot was implemented. And that was a Melrose team led by future University of Memphis star and coach Larry Finch and Ronnie Robinson.

 

In the finals, Mr. Fuqua scored 17, while Eddie Woods had 10, Larry Baker had 7, and Johnny Lawrence, Jesse Traylor, Charlie Andrews and Billy Pointer also contributed.

 

Mr. Fuqua, Mr. Baker, Mr. Traylor and Mr. Woods signed with Oral Roberts and would help the Oklahoma school reach the NIT and NCAA tournaments when both were big accomplishments. Mr. Stone would play for Tennessee Tech, while Mr. McGee entered the military. Mr. Lawrence attended Alabama A&M and graduated in 1974.  

 

Coach Sims’ son said that the Oral Roberts connection started because then-Oral Roberts coach Ken Trickey had coached at Middle Tennessee State, and he and coach Sims had become friends and felt a kinship and bond.

 

“They were both in the Army and had a military background and Dad had trust in coach Trickey that he would take care of the players,” the younger Dorsey Sims recalls, adding that his father knew a lot of people in basketball, including members of the Harlem Globetrotters. 

 

Coach Trickey, a white man, was among the earlier coaches who began recruiting black players in larger numbers at formerly white schools, including Middle Tennessee. School founder Oral Roberts was also of Cherokee lineage and looked at race differently from many, reports say. It also did not hurt that coach Sims was from Tulsa, where his father had worked for the Tulsa World newspaper.

 

While Riverside and some other black players from Cleveland and elsewhere in Tennessee were starting the Oral Roberts University glory run – which was highlighted in a recent documentary that is available online – the Trojans who remained were continuing the local tradition.

 

In the 1970 state tournament at Stokely Center in Knoxville, when the state tournament was rotated between three cities shortly before Murfreesboro’s Murphy Center became the longtime host site beginning in 1975, coach Sims’ rebuilding team lost a one-point heartbreaker to Nashville Cameron in the quarterfinals. Cameron, another historic black school, would go on to beat Melrose by 10 in the finals, so perhaps Riverside was the second-best team in the state.

 

Coach Alexander by that time was off starring for Alabama State’s basketball team, and he already knew a special program was being built by coach Sims, whose office was at the end of the hall on the right as one entered the Riverside gym from the Third Street entrance. 

 

Coach Alexander was a short point guard, whose flashy and Harlem Globetrotter-like style of play was not appreciated by his other coaches until he tried out his junior year under coach Sims, and the coach liked him.

 

“Coach Sims gave me my first chance to play,” said coach Alexander, who was given the nickname “Lil Prince” by radio announcer Gus Chamberlain due to his eye-catching play and diminutive size. Mr. Alexander would go on to be a regular the next two years and was able to see up close what made coach Sims successful. 

 

“He was a disciplinarian and that’s what made us so different from other schools,” he said, remembering the players had to have their hair cut a certain way and that coach Sims wanted only coachable players.

 

“And it was the running and shooting and pressing,” he said of the style later made famous by such teams as UNLV and Arkansas in the 1990s. “If you had weak guards, we would take advantage of you.”

 

While they moved fast in games, the time of practices would drag on before strict guidelines were set for schools. 

 

“We practiced at least 2½ or 3 hours a day, and on Saturday and Sunday,’ he said, even recalling practicing at the gym on Thanksgiving Day and eating a meal there.

 

“When everybody else was at home, we were in the gym,” said coach Alexander, who also had his own full court by his backyard near Central Avenue and Eighth Street. “That’s the kind of work you had to do to play basketball.”

 

He also recalls that coach Sims always kept the gym hot and that the coach encouraged everyone to keep playing basketball after the season, with the Riverside gym open for players from Riverside and elsewhere.

 

Dorsey Sims III, who was reached over the phone from Memphis where he now lives, said his father was also quite innovative. For example, he said they changed uniforms at halftime to feel fresher and had water girls who would use cut-off dish detergent bottles to give players water before the days of the sports drink containers.

 

“And he also had stat girls who would keep shot charts and rebound charts. And he waved a red handkerchief whenever he wanted his players to take a timeout,” the son recalled.

 

Coach Sims’ last season at Riverside was a slight disappointment, as the Trojans did not qualify for the 1971 state tournament. It was also won by Cameron of Nashville under coach and former Pearl High and UCLA player Ronnie Lawson Sr. right before it became a junior high due to desegregation plans. This marked the first time in five years Riverside did not qualify for the state. 

 

After that season, coach Sims left to go to City High. As coach Alexander recalled of the events that transpired, “They were trying to get the racial balance in the schools, so coach Sims had to leave to go to City High. People at City High wanted him, and he did not have a problem going.”

 

While his Dynamo teams were competitive and City had enjoyed some past success in basketball, it was harder winning with City’s smaller school zone from which to draw students. As a result, he did not reach the state tournament any of those years.

 

But greatness was still waiting for coach Sims. Coach Verties Sails Jr. had led Memphis Melrose to an undefeated state championship in 1974 with player John Gunn and others, but he left to become an assistant at Memphis. 

 

A couple of coach Sims’ former football teammates at Tennessee State from Melrose had recommended him for the job, and coach Sims decided to head to West Tennessee, in part because his wife was from that area.

 

“My mother was from Somerville, Tn. (in Fayette County) and her father had a funeral home there,” the younger Mr. Sims recalled.

 

Coach Sims would go on to win two state championships at Melrose – in 1978 and 1983 – before serving as an assistant for coach Larry Finch at Memphis from 1986-96. He died in 2000.

 

But the legacy coach Sims left behind at Riverside would continue. And the season after he left for City would involve an interesting twist in Riverside basketball and in Chattanooga basketball history in general.

 

Coach Alexander had finished his career at Alabama State in 1971 and had worked with some of the Riverside players during the summer at youth clinics around town. He also started substitute teaching at Orchard Knob Junior High, and since he was employed by the city, was able to continue to train the coachless Riverside players as they got ready for the 1971-72 season.

 

Finally, coach Sorrells told him he would be the new coach of Riverside, in part because coach Alexander knew the current players and was personally familiar with coach Sims’ successful system as a former player.

 

Coach Alexander jokingly recalls that Mr. Sorrells kept acting like he was still looking for a coach, but apparently always had Mr. Alexander in mind.

 

Coach Alexander would make the most of the opportunity, leading the Trojans to a state championship in 1972, the third and final one for this school that saw its enrollment start to decline in later years and would close in 1983 amid a shrinking available school zone.

 

In the 1972 state tournament at Vanderbilt’s Memorial Gymnasium, the Trojans beat Hillsboro, and then Lebanon and Kingsport Dobyns Bennett before beating Howard in the finals. Besides Anthony Roberts’ 24 points, Frank Jones had 15, Michael Buckley chipped in 11, and Jeffrey Poole scored 8.

 

That year’s Howard team was led by inside star Gerald Cunningham.

 

Mr. Roberts went on to a career with Oral Roberts and was drafted by the Denver Nuggets and played several years in the NBA. He was tragically shot and killed in an apartment parking lot in Tulsa in 1997.

 

Of the others on that team, Mr. Buckley went to Alabama A&M to play basketball. Mr. Jones, the other big star along with Mr. Roberts, went to Tennessee Tech, and Mr. Poole enrolled at UTC. Jimmy Howard, another standout player, entered the military after having an offer from South Carolina State, coach Alexander said.

 

In 1973, the first year the state tournament was split into large and small divisions, Riverside lost to Dobyns Bennett by 15 in the state semifinals.

 

The Trojans would return to the state under coach Alexander again in 1976 before losing to Nashville North, 74-70, in the semifinals of the Class AAA division in Murfreesboro’s Murphy Center.

 

After that year, coach Alexander went on to coach at Allen University, Knoxville College, Fort Valley State University and Chattanooga State. He has never stopped mentoring, and in recent years has been doing everything from developing an AAU program, to coaching the Brown Middle School team and working with the recreation program with his church, New Monumental Baptist Church.

 

“I just love basketball. That’s all I’ve ever done all my life,” he said with emotion as he reminisced at the former Riverside gym, now used by Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences but which also features the logos of Riverside and City High on its court as tributes. 

 

And never was basketball more front and center in his life than at Riverside as a player and coach. This team whose locker room was one floor down from the gym ascended to great heights. 

 

And plenty of credit can also go to coach Sims.

 

As Mr. Sims recalled of his father, “He started something at Riverside that hasn’t been duplicated. He started a legacy.

 

“And you had some super great athletes back at that time.”

 

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Jcshearer2@comcast.net