I’ve been to a few basketball games to watch the Medina High School boys play throughout the years, wondering if we would ever get back to the state basketball championship.
So far, it hasn’t happened, even though there were a couple of teams I thought should have made it.
During our basketball season of 1954 and 55, we won 25 games and lost only two. We won both tournaments we entered.
We won all of our district games, playing Center Point, Comfort, Leakey and Harper. We won bi-district against Barksdale.
Then we played in the regional competition in San Marcos and won against Kyle and Waelder.
The two games we lost were against Boerne and Dilley, but we came back and played them again and beat them the second time around. We played a lot of schools that were bigger than we were.
We were Class B, when some of our competitors were Class A and AA schools, like Boerne, Fredericksburg, and Northeast [which is now MacArthur HS in San Antonio], Bandera, Devine and Somerset.
After winning the regionals, we were excited to play in the state tournament in Austin. Our first game was against Dilley, which we had lost to earlier in the season. But we had learned what we needed to know to play them better.
The game went into overtime.
Don LeStourgeon scored 28 points in that game, but it was Henry Lee Zumwalt who won the game for us with his free throws.
With 5 seconds left and 3,000 people in the stands, the boy from our little country school made those free throws with the game on the line. We won, 52-51!
Unfortunately, we lost our next game to Avoca by six points. Avoca went on to win the state championship in the tournament. Don LeStourgeon made All-State in the tournament by scoring 77 points, more points than any other player in the contest.
During Medina High School Homecoming 2014, plaque honoring our team and coach WO Hatfield was installed in the school gym.
Players on this great team besides myself, Zumwalt, and my cousin, Don, were Don Dean, Tony Wilson, David Goss, RE Buckelew, Gail Evans, George Earl Sauter and Dave LeStourgeon.
Our junior varsity squad traveled to Austin as part of the team and included OK Stokes, Bob Padgett, Jerry Mayfield, Ernest Mayfield, Joel Bordon, Kenneth Keese, Leroy Keese, George Allsup, Frankie Allsup and Steven Koontz.
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