The winter storm is going to play havoc with a lot of events this week including high school basketball.
The storm got me to thinking about how winter weather has affected past seasons.
One incident that came to mind took place 50 years ago.
The St. Patrick Saints, coached by Gary McKinney, traveled to Pike County in January of 1975 and got snowed in at the Landmark Inn in Pikeville.
"We'd gone to Elkhorn City and played," McKinney recalled in a 2022 podcast interview. "Well, we come back from the game, and Joe Follmer, I remember Joe, he was driving the bus, and Jerry Schumacher was kind of a player-manager. So, the next day he calls and said 'Coach, have you looked outside?' And I said 'yeah, Jerry, we'll get on the bus pretty soon. Don't worry.' He said 'have you really looked outside?' I looked outside and we couldn't see our bus from the snow. And so I said 'well I guess we're going to be here for awhile.' Well, I called Sister Jude, well we called back to school and she was kinda perturbed that we couldn't make it back. She was more worried about the education. But we worked it out. So, finally, we got home on a Tuesday long enough to get our stuff and get the kids back home to take a shower, get their stuff and we loaded up and went to Deming and played ball ... It was an experience; kids did a wonderful job. We kinda bonded, all of us bonded down in Pikeville for about four days. But it was a good deal."
Tommy Purdon always told me people ran out of money on the trip because no one had credit cards back then.
"He took good care of that," McKinney recalled in 2022. "I don't know where he got some money, but he ended up with some money. I knew he didn't get it from me that's for sure. It was an experience, it really was."
St. Patrick won both games in Pike County and beat Deming 74-49 as part of a four-game winning streak.
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