Joe Spears had a theory about girls high school basketball. The Mount Holly High School coach didn’t compromise his training regimen just because the 20 or so athletes who practiced every afternoon happened to be female.

“I treat ‘em like boys,” he said. “We built pride in playing and being on the team. They worked hard to get on the team, and they worked hard to get in the ballgame. So I just treated ‘em like ballplayers. If you treat ‘em like girls, they’d play like girls.”

Spears guided the 1966-67 and 1967-68 Hawkettes to a combined 35-7 record and back-to-back Little Seven Conference regular-season titles. The 1967 team was the school’s first unbeaten team in league play. For that, those two teams’ members join Spears – a 2010 inductee – in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame.

“That group, they built up a pride in winning, and the younger girls would look to the older ones and pick up on it and carry it on,” said Spears, who also taught 8th grade. “I won their respect, I think. They knew I’d look after them.”

The girls remember his work ethic, but also his kindness, even though he ran his girls through the same drills as his boys teams. He made them stronger; made them faster.

“I’m telling you, we ran. I remember a lot of running,” said Ronda Martin Barker, who played for Spears four years before graduating in 1968 as team MVP. “He kept us in shape, but I think it was because he was so committed. He would make you run the bleachers until you felt you would fall over, but he was a wonderful coach.”

These are some of the girls who shared the experience:

Ronda Barker, a 5-foot-4 rover/point guard, started on the varsity as a freshman, in the era when girls still played six-on-six, with only two players allowed to go full court, across the center line. Spears had a deep bench, so when Barker found herself in a game once against Dallas, it didn’t seem unusual. The team was on a mission to avenge a previous loss, Barker said, and she brought the ball down court and looked to the sidelines for advice. “He just shrugged his shoulders,” she said, “and I thought, if the guards don’t come out, I’m supposed to shoot.” She said she remembers being at half-court, the pressure on, and launched the ball. It went in.

“I don’t think that was what I was supposed to do,” she said. “He about fell over.”
Barker, 63, attended Gaston College, then married Benny Barker in 1973 and had three sons and a daughter. The children all were high school athletes, and her daughter also became a cheerleader for the Charlotte Hornets and Bobcats.

Barker said her years with high school basketball taught her more than how to play a game. “Coach Spears expected everybody to be the best they could be. Everyone loved him dearly,” she said. “He would teach morals, too. It was so much more than basketball.

“In my life, he is one of the finest examples of a man, in every aspect of his life, that I have ever known.”

Jan Williams McKellar, 64, practiced with the varsity as an 8th-grader, then played four years before graduating in 1967. “Basketball was my love,” she said. “I grew up playing outside – back when children played outside, instead of on computers – and I played in the neighborhood, with the boys, so I didn’t get under the goal much. I learned to shoot from the outside.”

McKellar, a 5-foot-4 ½  rover/forward, was voted Most Athletic in her senior class.

“Coach Spears was wonderful, but he was tough. After practice, we had to run up and down the bleachers. I didn’t appreciate it then, but what great shape we were in,” she said. “Sometimes, I still dream about playing.”

McKellar went to Columbia College (“It was a girls’ school. They didn’t even have a gym.”) then became a stewardess for Delta Airlines, based in New Orleans, before moving to Columbia. She worked as a lobbyist for the South Carolina Medical Association and married Henry McKellar, an attorney and former circuit judge. They have a daughter, who lives in Florida.

She has a stack of pictures from her Hawkettes days, and newspaper clippings from Little Seven Conference games.

And she found that her connections to those times can be closer than expected.

Once at a work conference, with South Carolina Adjutant General Stan Spears, she mentioned she had played high school ball in Mount Holly, for a guy named Joe Spears.

“He called him up,” she said. “It was his brother.”

Lynne Williams Jessen, 62, Jan McKellar’s sister, played for Mount Holly from 1966 to 1969. She remembers the toughness of Spears, but also the camaraderie of the girls and the fun they had.

“Oh, my gosh, it was fun. He was a great coach, and there were a lot of rivalries we played, but we were just kids…we had so much school spirit,” she said. “Coach Spears made it fun. He’d get after you, but if he got after you it just meant he cared about you. He didn’t treat us like a bunch of little sissy girls, not at all.”

Jessen, who works at a boutique in Mount Holly, was a back-up rover behind Ronda Martin, then played first string her last two years. What Spears may not have known is that Jessen combined being an athlete with dating the man who is, literally, the love of her life.

She and Richard Jessen “started talking” in fifth grade. They went steady in seventh grade and got married right out of college (he was a walk-on basketball player at Gardner-Webb; she attended Central Piedmont Community College). They had three children and have been married 41 years.

Starr Dowdle McCorkle, 62, a 5-foot-7 ½ forward who graduated in 1968, said her fondest memories of those times was the fun, the sisterhood of the girls. “It was just a fun time, getting on the bus and riding to the games,” she said, “and everyone got along, it didn’t matter if you were a 10th or 11th or 12th-grader or one of the younger ones.”

She remembers one particular game at Dallas, when the Dallas team hung a paper banner on the gym wall proclaiming “We’re No. 1.” Mount Holly won the game, and the Hawkettes side started tearing the paper off the wall. “You could just hear the noise, from the people at Dallas. I think they had to escort the ballplayers to the bus,” she said. “What got me was that we were usually the calmest ones, but that game they had to escort us out.”

It also was against Dallas that McCorkle had her career high – 10 points.

After high school, she attended Gaston College for two years and took an office job in Gastonia. She and Gary McCorkle married in 1970 and had two sons – Steven and Casey – who, like them, live in Denver. They have three grandchildren.

“Basketball was about the only sport girls had to play back then,” she said. “I remember Coach Spears worked us hard, but he was a good coach. We had some good times.”

Janet Rick Pate, a 5-foot-6 guard, was one of the younger ones. She graduated in 1969 and was team captain her senior year. She still can name most of the girls on the team, and the fun they had. But she also remembers the pranks – mostly at games with Dallas.

“They and Cramerton were the toughest teams,” said Pate, who turns 62 in August.

After the girls games, the team would return to the locker room to change, then go back to the gym to watch the boys play. “Playing Dallas, we’d beat them, and they’d go down and put our uniforms in the toilet,” she said. “Sometimes, we’d have to walk out (after the games) with protection (from security guards) because we beat them all the time. Those were the good ol’ days.

“We’d always have fun on the bus rides, and we always said a prayer before we played. We played as a team and helped each other, whether we won or lost.”

She said Spears was tough, but it was worth it.

“He had a stick, and he’d tell us, ‘You have to jump this high,’ and he made sure we hit our foul shots. And if we missed, we’d better grab that ball,” she said.

Pate went to nursing school after graduation, married, and lived several years near Myrtle Beach, where she and her husband had a real estate company. She lives in Belmont now, and takes care of her mom. She has one son, and a grandson.

“The basketball years, those were good years. We had a lot of fun,” she said. “We all looked after each other. It was a close-knit family.”

Spears, 82, and his wife Marie, have two children and four grandchildren. He still follows basketball – he likes Duke, and Mike Krzyzewski.

“I had a philosophy,” Spears said, “that if the 9th-graders and the junior varsity worked hard, they could get on the team. I’d dress out 18 every game. Once they got to playing, they just had a certain spirit about them. There were a lot of good things about it.

“Do I miss it? Yes, I do. But I enjoyed it, though. That’s why I taught school. I love kids.”