Long after the newspaper clippings disappeared, and statistics became faded markings in a scorebook, the concept Derek Spears remembers most about his sports career is camaraderie with the people who accompanied it.

It was inevitable that he would play. His father, Joe, coached the Mount Holly High basketball team to its first-ever league regular season title in 1968 and guided the 1966-67 and 1967-68 girls teams to a combined 35-7 record. His little sister, Suzanne, went to college on a volleyball ride. Joe Spears is a 2010 inductee in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame.

Derek is 53 now, married with two kids and a job. His sports moments, the ones that were the most important thing in the whole wide world, are on a shelf, tucked aside.

“But my mom, she saved all kinds of things. We found them in boxes, stuff I’d forgotten about,” Derek Spears said. “She saved everything.”

Moms will do that.

When asked about his own Hall of Fame induction, Derek Spears didn’t boast about accomplishments in football or baseball or track. He mentioned his teammates, his coaches and his friends.  

“James Ford, he was in track. He showed me a lot. He was a good track guy, and he was a good guy to help me,” says Spears, who ran the 4x100 relay and 100-yard and 200-yard dash, and might have won a state relay title in 10th grade if not for a fall in the rain on a slippery track.

“We had some of the best times in the state.”

His sophomore year in 1978, his first at East Gaston High School, Spears quarterbacked the Warriors to their first-ever Southwestern 3A Conference title and first post-season victory, but it isn’t the wins or applause that he recalls: It’s the welcoming committee.

“I knew I could play in 10th grade – it was just a matter of playing,” he says. “We were practicing in the gym before the season started, and I can remember running a play where the quarterback runs a fake-out, and I was running in the gym, and this guy was sitting there, Ricky or James McDowell, one of the brothers. And he had these little pads, like you have on defense, and when I was carrying the fake-out, he came out and just nailed me with those pads.

“It was, ‘Welcome to high school.’”

The following spring, Spears played second base on the Warriors team that was state Class 3A runners-up. “I love baseball. My favorite memories, team-wise, would be in junior high, and I have quite a few memories of American Legion teams,” he says. “There are a lot of good stories…”

He’d rather mention the good coaches than the good stories.

“We had coach (Wayne) Bolick, coach (Buddy) Green… Junior high, that’s the age when a kid starts believing what somebody’s telling them. You start believing,” Spears says. “They would talk about playing in the college ranks, or the pros. That’s when it really started hitting me, this could be fun. And a lot of people from my team, they did play college or pro baseball, and I think some ran track in college. I guess that’s the goal, what a lot of us wanted to do.”

For Spears, in high school, recruiting letters arrived from across the South.

“The best part was going to the mailbox to see what you got. That was fun,” he says. “Some of the smaller schools, they wanted me to run track too, and play football. I decided real quick I didn’t want to do that.”

Mail came from Louisiana State University, North Carolina State, Winthrop, Coastal Carolina, South Carolina, Clemson …

He narrowed it to baseball, and Clemson, N.C. State and LSU.

Clemson won.

“I kinda liked Coach Bill Wilhelm. He was a legend down there.” Spears says. “And I can remember him coming to talk with my mom (Marie) and dad, and he was asking me, ‘You know, we have an all-conference second baseman coming back next year. You think you can beat him out?’

“I didn’t beat him out. He went on to play for the Mets for a long time…”

Spears played at Clemson as a utility infielder and outfielder as a freshman, then was red-shirted his sophomore year (“The all-conference guy was still there.”), then played some as a junior behind Bill Spiers, who went on to a career with the Houston Astros.

“So practically everyone I played with there, there were about seven major leaguers on those teams,” he says.

Spears went on to the business world. He lives in Charlotte with his wife, Missy, and their sons Jake, 7, and Vance, 11. Vance plays tennis and squash. Jake favors baseball and basketball. Life is busy, the phone rings a lot, and Spears looks back at his baseball career and laughs and says it would be awful hard, now, to hit a good slider.

“I could run real fast and play defense, but I sometimes had a lack of ability to hit the ball…,” he says. “This Hall of Fame, I’m not sure I deserve it, but it’s a great honor. There’s a ton of people other than me who should be in there, but I appreciate it.”