Career Highlights
1959-1962: Mount Holly High School football
104 Points: Top scorer in county, senior year
Recruited by UNC-Chapel Hill, Tennessee and Virginia
Standout at Castle Heights Military Academy
Finished playing career at Western Carolina
Reggie Ballard
Reggie Ballard.
Owner of the End Zone.H
Reggie Ballard has the newspaper clippings, highlighted in yellow, describing his success at Mount Holly High in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
“Reggie Ballard scored three of the Hawk tallies,” one says, about a 40-0 win over Cramerton.
Then, in a 27-13 win over the “invading” Mount Pleasant Tigers: “Friday night, Reggie Ballard scored two touchdowns to make a shamble of the area scoring race.” And, “He intercepted a Tiger pass and scampered to pay dirt.”
Ballard, who is being inducted into the Mount Holly Sports Hall of Fame, had 91 points before his last high school game, when the papers let fans know he would be “aiming at the century mark.”
He finished with 104 points scored his senior year, including extra points.
“I’m not intentionally trying to toot my own horn,” Ballard says, “but I scored maybe 10 touchdowns my junior year and 17 my senior year and was third in the state in scoring, and nobody at Mount Holly High School has ever done that, far as I can find out. And that was on a nine-game schedule.”
Ballard began competitive football in seventh grade, when his friend Jimmy talked him into trying out. At Mount Holly, Ballard started all four years – at center his freshman season, then a “lonesome end” as a sophomore and in the backfield his last two years.
He got a full ride to UNC-Chapel Hill and offers from a few other colleges before attending Castle Heights Military Academy in Tennessee, serving in the military stationed in Germany and finishing his football career at Western Carolina.
“And I’ve got an elephant memory,” he says. “I remember all of it, my childhood and all.”
Ballard was born in Mount Holly, at home, in March 1944. His twin sister, Rheba, grew up to marry a preacher and move to Macon, Ga., where the couple started a church. He lives in Forest, Virginia, now, a small town just southwest of Lynchburg.
“I remember we did very well in the conference championships my junior and senior years,” he says, “but we got a bad rap. We went on to the 3A playoffs, and we got killed in the state playoffs by Winston-Salem [James A.] Gray 68-0. The next year, Winston-Salem moved to 4A and we were 2A. After that, we got to play some of the smaller teams.”
He remembers the team being invited to play up toward Brevard in a 3A game, “And I was opposed to going and getting killed again. So I voted against it. The other co-captain did, too. That was [2007 MHSHOF inductee] Delmer Wiles,” he says. “So we didn’t go.”
Ballard never missed a football game in high school. At 6-foot-2, he also played center for the basketball team. “And even though I can’t prove it, and it’s probably irrelevant, I probably grabbed the most rebounds in school history,” he says. “I could stick my hand 6 or 8 inches down inside the basket. I could stuff the ball. Back then, we could only do that in practice, though. We couldn’t do it in games; it was against the rules.”
In addition to UNC, the University of Tennessee and University of Virginia recruited him, and he had a connection through Wiles that could have put him at Indiana, he says.
“I should have gone to Tennessee,” he says. “They played the single wing at the time. I didn’t have perfect enough grades to get into Chapel Hill.”
He chose, instead, to play for Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame member Stroud Gwynn at Castle Heights. “He was a legend,” Ballard says. “Knoxville flew a plane to the last [high school] game I played, and they wanted me to fly to the campus and visit, and they’d fly me back home. But I wanted to go to Chapel Hill and play for Jim Hickey [who coached from 1959 to 1966]. But my dad had just died, and I made a few mistakes, and I went to Castle Heights, then back home to go to work, over in Gastonia. I knew I was going to get drafted, so I joined the Army.”
Ballard was in Germany from September 1964 to December 1966. The post had a pee-wee football team, and Ballard was asked to coach it. “We had no offense the first four games. I wrote home and asked Coach Wiles to send me some plays,” he says. “I’ve never seen little kids take to the single wing like those kids did. We won six in a row and finished 7-4, lost the last game in a snow storm. I mean a snow storm.”
About 13 years ago, Ballard got the idea to contact one of his players, who was living in Tampa. They reminisced a bit, then the player asked Ballard if he remembered a certain kid from that overseas team…and asked if he ever watched Star Trek. That kid, his player said, played Geordi La Forge – guy named LaVar Burton.
“And that’s ‘the rest of the story,’” Ballard says.
After returning to the states, Ballard attended Western Carolina but an injury forced him to leave football behind. He came home to Mount Holly, married, and worked for Duke Energy for 30 years, leaving the company in 1997. He has two daughters and a son.
He’s divorced, but has rekindled a relationship with a woman he knew in high school, who lives in Virginia, also. To make the trip back for the Hall of Fame, he says, “is an honor.”
These days, Ballard can be found flying his 1953 Piper Tri-Pacer, a four-seater short-wing plane that, he says, “is a lot of fun.” He doesn’t mention if he’ll drive or fly to return to Mount Holly for the ceremony, but he does mention the name of the airplane organization he’s joined. It’s called Sentimental Journey.