One of our own has made the NCAA Final Four in basketball for a second time. Clay Henson and his Guilford College Quakers are returning to the Salem Virginia Civic Center this weekend for the Division III national championship.
Henson, a former Freedom High standout, is a four-year starter at Guilford and is among the top three-point shooters in Division III basketball.
Guilford won the Eastern Regional this past Saturday with a 90-80 victory over Eastern Mennonite University and will face Williams College Friday at 5 p.m. in the national semifinals. Randolph Macon will play UW-Stevens Point in the other semifinal.
The Quakers won the Old Dominion Athletic Conference this season and Randolph Macon gives the conference two teams in the final four. The finals are set for 1 p.m. Saturday.
Henson had 25 points in last week's regional final.
This year's ACC Tournament is history and six of the league's teams move on to the first round of the 64 team NCAA championship extravaganza this week.
The tournament has lost so much of its early greatness that it's now only a ghost of its glory days.
The ACC was the first of the nation's elite conferences to have a postseason tournament and I really believe it was the tourney that set us apart and helped us achieve elite status to begin with.
We had a number of things going for us to make our conference the nation's best at one time.
We had great natural rivalries made even more intense by our Big Four's proximity. Before Wake Forest moved to Winston-Salem, there was only 15 miles separating them and the other three, State, Carolina and Duke.
NC State had one of the first 12,000-seat campus coliseums in the country and Duke's 9,000-seat campus arena was also one of the top venues for college basketball.
The ACC was the first conference to have its own television network and when UNC won the 1957 national championship, our league went into high gear. Tickets to the conference tournament became as hard to get as Masters golf tournament tickets and harder to get than NCAA Final Four tickets.
Eight of the finest colleges and universities in the South made up the league and all were able to put up the revenues needed to have top-flight basketball programs. The league developed an unparalleled strength from top to bottom.
Soon most of the nation's top conferences copied our example but it wasn't until the late 1970s that the change occurred that altered the ACC tournament forever.
The NCAA voted to allow more than one team from a conference into its national tournament, taking away the real significance of our local championship event.
There is one real value left to the present ACC tournament. Teams get a second chance to salvage a poor season but this is a far cry from the attraction the event had in the good old days.
Roy Waters is a sports columnist for The News Herald. Waters was baseball and basketball coach at Salem High School from 1955-66, where his teams won 18 championships. In 2007, he was inducted into the Burke County Sports Hall of Fame.
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