Class of 2017
Eddie Wyatt Jr.
Eddie Wyatt Jr. remembers waking early on school days to run. He ran downhill on Stanley Spencer Mountain Road to the South Fork of the Catawba River then back up the hill, because doing that climb each morning would give a bantam athlete endurance. To a “really, really, small” ninth-grader – short, maybe 120 pounds – sports such as football and basketball weren’t suitable, though he did do football in 1962-63. So Wyatt ran track and devised training schemes to push his limits and shrink his times. “Track wasn’t taken very seriously then. It was just another sport for those not playing baseball. I kind of liked it that way, because we knew everybody (on the teams) from ninth grade through the 12 th ,” he says, “and they were more friendly toward each other. Now, sports have gotten so big, they don’t know each other. “Coach Dick Thompson (MHSHOF, Class of 2009) encouraged me to come out for track. I didn’t do well my 9 th -grade year, so as a sophomore I switched to the mile and 880 and started having some success at it. I had decent speed, but I wasn’t a very good high-jumper or hurdler, which I tried as a 9 th -grader, and on sprints, I got out-run. So I tried the mile on a whim.” Wyatt measured a course in his backyard – he calculated 7 laps around the yard would equal a mile – and trained there. “When I wasn’t getting faster, I’d get up before school and started running on the road. That’s what gave me my endurance and it led me to believe that hill running and road work was good for developing distance runners.” Wyatt, 72, of Stanley turned that self-discipline into a successful track career as a record-setting athlete and a coach, which led to his induction in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame. He set a school record for the mile – at 4:34 – his senior year at Stanley High, when the school won the Little 7 Conference championship, and also was all-conference in the 880 and mile run, winning both at the conference meet. He segued to Gaston College – but college intentions were redirected by the military, which escorted him on a tour of several foreign countries, earned him a Purple Heart, and sent his higher education on a 60-year escapade that concluded with a bachelor’s degree in Engineering Technology in 2003. “I’ve been in the military half my life and college the other half,” he says. “When you’re working full time, you can’t go to school full time, so you have to take it a class or two at a time.” Wyatt’s college credits were transferred many times, to accompany his many moves. “I got talked into it (enlisting) by a man in dress blues. They sent out postcards, and I said I was interested in their 120-day delay program and he came to the house talked to me directly” he says. “They had a way of persuading people who may have been a little reluctant, but he told me stories and I was hooked. I graduated May 27 and my first day at Parris Island was June 6, in the Marine Corp. All the others went to the beach and enjoyed themselves; I joined the military.” He served 35 years – in Vietnam, Desert Storm, at Rein-Mein Air Base in Germany, in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Operation Iraqi Freedom, for a total of 26 military ribbons and medals. His Purple Heart was awarded following Operation Iraqi Freedom. “I had a bad fall during the night. I blew out my right knee and my back when I stepped into a ditch in pitch black darkness,” he says. Wyatt kept his desire to run as an adult and managed to complete 21 marathons and other races – 5K, 10K, half- marathons. He set personal best times as an adult in the 1 mile at 5:10; 5K at 18:04; 10K at 37:50; 10-mile at 1 hour, 4 minutes; and marathon at 3 hours, 14 minutes. At age 44, he ran a 5:10 mile in a Charlotte event called the Tryon Street Mile, featured on the television show “PM Magazine.” It was there that he met one of his biggest influences in running, Jim Beatty. “He was the first person to break the 4-minute mile (3:58.9), and he was from Charlotte and was there when I ran the 5;10,” he says. Wyatt says it wasn’t his plan to take his talents to East Gaston High School as a track coach, but plans have a way of changing. “Coach Robert Keaton was there, and I took my son (Rodney) by and it was grades 10 through 12 back then, and I was trying to get my son interested, and Coach Keaton said he’d love to have him,” Wyatt, who also has two daughters, says of his East Gaston initiation in 1983. “And he says, ‘I heard you were into running. Could you help us out?’ And I did for about two days, then they kept adding days, and by the end of the year I was a full-time volunteer coach.” By fall, he also was the cross country coach. He coached from 1983 to 2014. His boys teams won six conference championships, and his girls teams won five. In 1985, his boys were undefeated. This past May, Wyatt was asked to help out at an East Gaston track meet – a lure to get him on the premises, where the track was dedicated in his name. But for all the road training, the races, the military service and the coaching, Wyatt says his biggest accomplishment is none of the above. “I would have to say it’s just being a leader in my church,” Wyatt says. “It’s the year I was Church Council president (at Christ Lutheran in Stanley). On the top of my list is God, and everything else falls under that. My family would be second, and everything else falls somewhere under that.”
Grant Hoffman Jr.
Sometimes, the path we choose becomes the road less traveled, and the detour is better than the original plan. Grant Hoffman’s sports experiences in high school began a series of changes of direction that led him through college and championship seasons, to professional success in Florida and back to North Carolina, away from the games he enjoyed. As a teenager, Hoffman wanted to be a football player, maybe be good enough for college, but he was tinkering with golf, too, though not with any intention of making it a job. Hoffman was East Gaston High School’s starting quarterback from 1975 through 1977 and was second-team All-Gazetteland in 1977, an award given by the Gaston Gazette newspaper to recognize top athletes. He was all-conference honorable mention as a senior, and a few colleges took notice, without offers. “I was probably better at football than golf. I loved football and always looked forward to it,” he says. “If I could have gone to college and played football, that’s what I would have done, but I was too small – only about 5-foot-10 and 170 pounds. I really didn’t start focusing on golf until about two years after high school.” He played golf at East Gaston, along with football, and was all-conference all three years and WNCHSAA individual champion in 1976, the year EGHS won the team golf title. With his football road ending and no one recruiting him for golf, Hoffman turned to the University of North Carolina-Charlotte for a year, where he played golf as a walk-on in 1978 – well enough to get a phone call from Randy Hines, the coach at Limestone College. “I had kind of dropped out of school for a little while, then I got a call from the golf coach at Limestone. He had heard about me and asked if I would be interested in coming to school there, so I guess he caught me at the right time,” Hoffman says. “From that time, when he offered me a golf scholarship, that’s when I began my golf career. Randy really encouraged me and helped me, and he was one of the biggest influences in my whole life. I had a lot of folks who influenced my life, and that’s really important. But Randy had the biggest influence as far as golf because he challenged me to set goals and to achieve those goals. And I was fortunate to meet all of them except one, which was to win an individual national championship. I came close. I finished third one year.” Hoffman was all-conference four years – 1978-81 – and conference player of the year in 1979 and 1980, the two seasons he also won the conference individual title. He was a tournament individual champion five times at Limestone, and his team finished seventh nationally in 1979, third in 1980 and won the national championship in 1981 at the Saginaw Valley Golf Course in Bay City, Mich. Hoffman turned pro. “I won the Gaston County Amateur title two years in a row (1986, 1987) and went pro in 1991. I played on the mini-tour, and I just got married and we moved to Orlando and I planned to go to qualifying school the next year,” he says. “I was fortunate enough to win one tournament, and won some money in some others.” The road ahead looked good this time. Until it hit another curve. “I developed an elbow problem, a severe case of tendinitis in my left elbow to the point where I literally could not hold onto a golf club,” Hoffman says. “The orthopaedic doctor said to rest it a couple of weeks, but it never did heal. My elbow just couldn’t hold up under the pressure of hitting a golf ball, so in a fortunate way it led me to what I’m doing now.” Hoffman, 57, is pastor of Center Cross Baptist Church in Asheboro. He and his wife, Sonia, have three sons, Garret, Colson and Joshua. “I majored in business management in college, and shortly after I came back from Florida and moved back to Charlotte, I was offered my old job back as assistant pro at Rolling Hills Golf Club (in Monroe) and worked there several months,” he says. “Then one evening, during a crusade from Bailey Smith at First Baptist of Indian Trail, I felt a very strong urge to go into the ministry. I went and talked with my pastor.” This time, he knew where the road was supposed to lead. Hoffman attended Southeastern Theological Seminary for three years and received his Masters of Divinity. The former quarterback and golfer found his calling. He still holds the course record at Glen Oaks Golf Club in Maiden – a 61 – and says he’s shot 62 and 63 several times. He’s passed his talent to his son Colson, who also has a low of 61, though he isn’t pursing the sport competitively. Being inducted into the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame makes Hoffman’s road come full-circle. “I’m honored to even be considered, to be quite honest,” he says. “There’s no possible way that I would even be considered if it weren’t for the people who had an impact on my life. I’m very grateful.”
Carmen Baker
When childhood innocence collides with natural talent, and determination and persistence join in, good things happen. Athletes in year-round sports understand: There is no off-season, your sport is something you do, not something you play and your mindset is oblivious to anything different. Carmen Baker made that discovery at age 8. “I just dove into a pool when I was 8 and realized that it was for me. I don’t think at that point in my juncture that I thought anything about it,” she says. “I didn’t realize that other kids weren’t doing the same things. It was just my normal, everyday life.” Baker, 39, grew up in Mount Holly and swam competitively for the Gaston Gators throughout her childhood, was East Gaston High School’s Athlete of the Year four years running, beginning in ninth grade while still in junior high and went on to break records at North Carolina State after being recruited by several colleges. Her resulting induction into the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame is, she says, “a great honor.” “I would say that at 10 years old I was going five days a week, after school, and when I was 13 it was six days a week and doubles in the summer,” she says. “I was efficient at multi-tasking, for sure. We went straight from school to my neighbors’ house to get a snack and carpool, then straight to practice, then homework, bath, eat, bed. Once I got to be about 13, I realized my friends were going to camp and things in the summer, but I had double practice and it was like, I get it. I’m doing something weird. My summers were in overdrive.” Baker’s environment consisted of the Gaston YMCA pool, or an outdoor pool or at Belmont Abbey, where she would chisel at her times in the 200 and 400 individual medley, the butterfly, the breaststroke. At age 8, she swam fast enough to qualify for a Future Stars meet. At 10, she had four first-place finishes in a Junior Olympics meet, and as an 11-12 age grouper, she made Junior Olympics again and the Southeast Regional Championships. “For some reason, I always had a propensity to do butterfly. No one wanted to do it, so I had a better shot at winning,” she says. “It’s definitely something that, like it can’t be taught. I did breaststroke at that age a lot, too. At 13, you’re allowed to do a 400 IM, and I realized I was an endurance swimmer. I’m definitely a come-from- behind type of person, so I wanted to swim faster than they did at the end.” At the State Games for her 13-14 age group, Baker was first in the 400 IM, second in 100 fly, second in 200 backstroke, second in the 200 IM, second in the 200 fly, third in the 200 freestyle and third in the 200 breast. She was chosen for the North Carolina Select Team in 1992, a group for which only 24 females are picked. Her high school team practiced at Belmont Abbey, and she was East Gaston’s only entry in the 4A State Championships in 1992, as a ninth-grader, and made States every year afterward. In 1995, she was named 4A State female swimmer of the year for North Carolina. Interest came from the University of Arizona (too far away, she says), and recruiting visits and talks followed with East Carolina, UNC-Chapel Hill, West Virginia, Clemson and N.C. State, which she chose because, well, it would be something different. “My family was all Carolina fans, and as a little kid I always asked why, and they couldn’t tell me, so I picked a rival. Duke is the rival in basketball, but they didn’t have a scholarship available,” she says. “I knew I wanted to go to a North Carolina school to be close to home if I had to be. I just loved the people at the N.C. State campus, the swimmers were awesome, the coaches were phenomenal.” She received a 55-percent scholarship, then after breaking the school record in the 400 IM by 2 seconds her freshman season at the ACC Championship, it became a full ride. She was named All-ACC and qualified for Senior Nationals. She broke her own school record as a senior. Now, looking back at that 8-year-old who dove headfirst into a childhood of pursing the sport she loved, Bruce and Dawn Baker’s daughter can see a different story than the one she lived every day. “My dad was a tennis player, and he got offered money to go to school but he wanted to go into the Marines. He and my mother were my biggest supporters, but I realize today the time and the money they poured into going to these meets,” she says. “It was a huge commitment on their end, and they never said anything about it. They were just like, what do you need? And, we’re here to support you.” She “kinda idolized” the swimmers of the day, like Janet Evans. And a girl from Charlotte, Kelly Frazer, who went on to swim at the University of Georgia. “She and I practiced together often, and she was someone I could never get in front of, so I tried to be faster,” Baker says, “because she was like the mouse you could never catch. “And Greg Armstrong, my age-group coach, besides my parents, he was my greatest supporter, going with me on long trips like to Michigan for Nationals. He was like a second dad, always encouraging me and helping me shoot for my dreams, in a small town. “I owe it all to him, my parents, and of course, God.”
James Ford
The boys gathered in the parking lot after class to measure distances and run sprints on the pavement, because their high school didn’t have a track and the road to championships required improvisation. In the late 1980s, when high school track and field teams competed without classifications of 1A, 2A and so on, East Gaston High made do with car-lot workouts and borrowing yardage on the football field. “We put the hurdles out on the grass. And we were all-conference and all-state without having a track,” says James Ford, who collected numerous sprint and hurdles titles. “We practiced sprints in the parking lot. I was blessed to be on a super high school team that won championships my junior and senior year.” Ford, 54, used that adversity, plus training help from friends in the sport, to become a record-setter at two universities, carry his work ethic into a long career in two occupations and land in the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame as an inductee. He already serves the Hall of Fame as a committee member. His perseverance in high school led to recruiting letters from 46 colleges, he says, nearby and as far as the University of Florida. He understood the necessity of being in the right place with the right times. “I missed my high school prom because of State Meet when I was a 17-year-old. I had to think what my priorities were. I had to run, and I had to win,” Ford says. “When you work this hard at something, looking back I must have been crazy, but I knew it, I dreamed it, and I felt like when I walked on campus (as a freshman at High Point University) that they recruited me to win. I think I did well.” Ford stayed at High Point one year, broke the 200-meter school record and was conference Athlete of the Year for track. He also was all-conference in the 100-meters and 200, and his 100-meter time was in the top 15 nationwide, he says. Ford transferred to Western Carolina and red-shirted a year before helping that school build a successful program. But his affection for running began long before passing cars in the East Gaston parking lot. “As a kid, there was Field Day,” he says. “I realized that I was one of the fastest kids in elementary school, and I enjoyed baseball and had a real passion for baseball, but in middle school I went out for track and ran hurdles, and I ran hurdles from middle school to high school to college, and I found out I could sprint. And that became my ticket.” Few track athletes, he says, combine sprinting with hurdles in their repertoire. “It helped with college,” he says, “because they were looking at diversification – where they could fit you in.” He broke the Southwest Conference record in high school for low hurdles at 20:38, then two weeks later recorded a 19:67. “At the time, that was in the top three (times) in that event out of 490 schools in the state, so that made it a little special,” he says. His best time in the 100 meters in high school, he says, was 10.5. In college, 10.36. “I was a big-meet guy. I always performed my best in big meets,” he says. “And that’s what made the difference in my career.” At Western Carolina, where he transferred to help build up the program, his 4x200-meter relay team’s time of 1:24.14 from the 1984 Georgia Relays remains a school record. Ford segued his bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice and Political Science to a 30-year career in Mecklenburg County in education and social services. He also has another role: church pastor. Longtime friend and former East Gaston principal Marty Starnes recognized Ford’s faith and persistence many years ago and has worked alongside him in Rotary Club and other endeavors. “The skillset that James so clearly adopted as a high school athlete, he carried with him to college, to his career and to his community,” she says. “Equally important, James Ford is a man of strong faith with God as his pilot. He is a dedicated husband and father. “In 1 Corinthians, Chapter 9, Paul tells us to ‘Run your race in life in such a way as to win.’ This is truly fitting when thinking of James Ford and his impact on our community. To say that I admire him is an understatement.” Ford was licensed and ordained into the ministry in 1990 and became pastor of Morningside Missionary Church in Mount Holly in 2000. He and his wife, Elaine, have a 12-year-old daughter, Abigail, who is getting started in track, he says, and is a Gaston Christian honor roll student. “She was the fastest kid in fifth grade,” he says. While Abigail begins, Ford says his running is complete. “I coach at Gaston Christian, their hurdlers and sprinters. It’s my first year,” he says. “But when I graduated college, I knew my time was done. From 1985 to today, I didn’t coach, didn’t do anything. I did all I needed to do and left it on the track. I had a great career.”
East Gaston’s 1977 Golf Team
To win a state championship in golf, the secret formula for East Gaston High School was to throw a little of everything into the mix and see what came about. The 1977 team, which won the WNCHSAA title, was led by a junior who’d rather play football, a former football coach who coached basketball, a girl who played off the men’s tees and a group of guys – including one comedian – who had to leave the county just to practice. Together, they compiled a three-year record of 69-3 against the state’s toughest opponents and formed a bond that Coach Larry Armstrong still pulls memories from, 40 years later. “I inherited a bunch of really good golfers. And I didn’t have but one rule,” he says. “They couldn’t play on my team unless they could beat me. And they didn’t have any trouble doing that. One of those years, the guys were so good that we might have three, four, five of them who could shoot in the 60s, and they’d be mad if they didn’t break par.” This Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame team consisted of seniors T.R. Reid, Mark Lingerfelt, David Boaz, Jimmy Buff and Darren Emmett, and underclassmen Royce Hawley, David Craig, Grant Hoffman, Joey Shirley, Jeff Williams, Donna Green and Mark Stroupe. Armstrong, also the school’s basketball coach and a former football assistant at Stanley High School, says the team’s strength wasn’t what opponents would expect. “The team that won the championship, I didn’t have the best team overall but I had the best workers,” Armstrong says. “Most of the guys, except Grant and David Boaz, didn’t hit the ball that far, but they were accurate with chipping and putting, and that’s what would rattle the other teams so bad. The other teams would hit the ball long off the tee, and we might not but we’d chip and putt and beat them. And that’s because they practiced in the offseason.” Practices were held at Pine Island Country Club in Charlotte and Green Meadows in Mount Holly. “Pine Island probably made the biggest difference in their game. Green Meadows didn’t have any sand traps, but Pine Island had it all,” Armstrong says. “The people were so gracious to let us play our matches there.” It was common, during matches, for players to share information about their home course with those who’d never played it. And East Gaston went up against some of the state’s finest – Crest, Kings Mountain, R-S Central, East Rutherfordton, South Point. Still, sportsmanship is sportsmanship. “One of my players, Darren Emmett, he had a way of getting on the other team’s nerves. Now, he didn’t do anything wrong, but he was funny,” Armstrong says. “We were playing Shelby at Pine Island, and Darren was big, about 6-foot-2 and 225, a big guy. And if someone hadn’t played the course before, they’d ask an opponent about the hole, and they’d tell them, exact. So the Shelby guy had a second shot on a par-4, and the guy asked Darren and Darren told him. And the guy says, ‘I don’t think it’s that far.’ So he flew it way down the fairway, way too far, and Darren says, ‘It’s deceiving, ain’t it?’” Hoffman, who played quarterback at EGHS from 1975 through 1977 and college golf at Limestone before turning pro, was a team leader, even though a slight misunderstanding kept Hoffman from being a three-sport athlete. “I asked him why he didn’t go out for basketball, told him he could have helped our team. And he said that between junior high and high school, I talked to him about being the back-up for our No. 1 point guard, and that hurt his feelings, so he didn’t go out,” Armstrong says. “He didn’t want to be a back-up. Sometimes, though, you say things so that people can prove you wrong.” If anyone thought a girl couldn’t play a boys game, Donna Green proved them wrong. “We didn’t have a girls team, and she wanted to play golf. She was excellent,” Armstrong says. Green, who later married and had a son, attended UNC-Charlotte on a golf scholarship after graduating from East Gaston in 1978. She died in August, 2009. “The teams I had were so gifted, and a lot of those kids belonged to Pine Island Country Club, or played a lot with their parents, and I was just fortunate to have them,” Armstrong says. “Then there’s Kevin Spittle, who was instrumental in building our golf program but wasn’t there that last year, and Lisa Campbell and Sandy Ness, who were our scorekeepers. “After we won the western part of the state, the following year the championship became the whole state. I guess we were the outlaws. And that’s the year I gave up coaching. “It never crossed my mind to be in the Hall of Fame. It was just a shock and a surprise. It was the best thing, though, being able to work with those young people.”
