Our next meeting will be our Durham Sports Club Scholar-Athlete Awards Luncheon. Please note this will be a LUNCH meeting! We’ll be honoring the top male and female scholar-athletes from Durham’s six high schools, Durham Academy and Voyager Academy. We’ll be paying tribute to Harold Strawbridge, Mildred Barnes, Russell Blunt, Willie Bradshaw, and our own Tommy Hunt by awarding $27,000 in scholarships to these students. Attendance is expected to be heavy, so we will insist on RSVPs to attend. Guests are welcome – the guest fee will be $25.
After this meeting, we’ll move into our summer schedule. The meeting dates will be 6/21, 7/19, 8/2, 8/16, 9/20. After that, we’ll go to our regular 1st and 3rd Wednesday meetings for October, November and December.
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All Meetings at Croasdaile Country Club
6/21/23 – John LeBar, Club Member and Author
7/19/23 – Brian Kalbas, Head Women’s Tennis
8/2/23 – Andrew Carter, Reporter, News & Observer
Our guest speaker for this meeting will be Valerie Gillispie, University Archivist at Duke University. Gillispie will be speaking about the earlier history of Duke Football.
Coming to Duke in 2011, she leads the University Archives (UA) in facilitating undergraduate research opportunities, working with campus offices and student groups to collect their records, and incorporating university history into numerous classes and campus events. UA has actively expanded its online holdings, with digitization of the Chronicle student newspaper, student radio broadcasts from the late 1960s, and the entirety of the Chapel Recordings collection, a grant-funded project completed in partnership with the Divinity School. UA is also actively collecting electronic records, including social media and websites. UA is a key resource for next year’s Duke Centennial, and Val and her team, in partnership with student curators, will be installing a yearlong exhibit to celebrate Duke’s 100 years. As the University Archivist, Val is especially interested in understanding Duke’s complex and sometimes painful history, and making sure that all voices are included in the records collected by UA.
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6/7/23 – Scholar-Athlete Awards LUNCHEON
6/21/23 – John LeBar, Author
7/19/23 – Special Guest Speaker
Our guest speaker for this meeting will be Trei Oliver, Head Football Coach at North Carolina Central University. Oliver was named the 2022 Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference “Football Coach of the Year”. In his third season as head football coach at his alma mater, he led the Eagles to their first conference championship in six years and an overall record of 10-2, including a victory over Jackson State in the Cricket Celebration Bowl – the National Championship for Historically Black Universities and Colleges. The team was just the sixth team in school history to win nine games in the regular season, and the third to win 10 or more in total.
Oliver was named as the 24th Head Football Coach in December, 2018. In the prior 15 seasons (2004-18) as a coach at four different universities, Oliver was a part of only one season with fewer than seven wins. During that time, his teams had 124 victories for an average of more than eight wins per year and a winning percentage of .725.
Oliver’s first coaching stint at NCCU was as a defensive backs and wide receivers coach, recruiting coordinator and special teams coordinator from 2003-06. The Eagles captured back-to-back CIAA championships with consecutive trips to the NCAA Division II playoffs in 2005 and 2006, and were crowned as the black college football national champions following an 11-1 season in 2006.
He and his wife Yvette, also an NCCU graduate, are the proud parents of a son, Reggie.
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5/17/23 – Valerie Gillespie, Archivist, Duke University
6/7/23 – Scholar-Athlete Awards LUNCHEON
6/21/23 – Special Guest Speaker
Our guest speaker for this meeting will be Dave Odom, Former Head Basketball Coach at Wake Forest, University of South Carolina and others. In 1965, Odom accepted a job as the coach of Goldsboro High School while enrolled at East Carolina University in pursuit of a master’s degree in physical education. Odom coached Goldsboro High School for four seasons between 1965 and 1969, he was also a drivers ed instructor during this time. After graduating from East Carolina in 1969, Odom took a job at Durham High School. He coached at Durham for seven years (1969–1976) where he was voted his league’s coach of the year five times.
Odom began his collegiate coaching career as an assistant at Wake Forest University in 1976 under head coach Carl Tacy. After three years at Wake Forest (1976–1979), Odom became the head coach at East Carolina University, where his squad compiled a 16-11 record, the university’s best since 1965. Odom stayed with the program until 1982, when he was offered a chance to return to the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) as an assistant at the University of Virginia. Upon his arrival in Winston-Salem, Odom inherited a team that had suffered four straight losing seasons under head coach Bob Staak. In his 12 seasons (1989–2001) as head coach, Odom compiled a record of 240-132, making him the second-highest winning coach in Wake Forest history, as well as the second highest winning percentage in school history. During this time, Wake Forest earned 7 straight NCAA Tournament appearances and one NIT championship. Odom was named ACC coach of the year in 1991, 1994 and 1995.
Odom left Wake Forest to accept the job as head coach of the University of South Carolina in 2001, replacing former coach Eddie Fogler. During his tenure at South Carolina, his team earned one NCAA tournament bid, and made three appearances in the NIT, winning the championship in 2005 and 2006. He was named SEC Coach of the Year in 2004. On January 2, 2008, Odom coached his 400th collegiate victory as a head coach. Later that month, on January 18, he announced that he would retire at the end of the 2007-2008 basketball season, his seventh at South Carolina. He coached his final game for USC on March 14, 2008, in the SEC tournament.
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5/3/23 – Another Special Guest Speaker to be announced
5/17/23 – Yet Another Special Guest Speaker to be announced
6/723 – SPECIAL EVENT – Stay Tuned!
The Speaker for our next meeting will be David Shumate, the Director of Broadcasting for the Blue Devil IMG Sports Network. In this role, he serves as the play-by-play voice for Duke football and men’s basketball games.
A native North Carolinian, Shumate graduated from Appalachian State University in 2006 with a Bachelor of Science degree in communication with a concentration in electric media and broadcasting. He started freelancing with ISP Sports—earning $30 to call a coaches’ show, maybe $100 for a football game—where he’d drive two hours each way and barely break even. He became an administrator in the Greensboro school system, which brought him closer to ISP in Winston-Salem and left him time in the evenings for announcer gigs. The following year, Shumate moved to Auburn as a temporary fill-in. But when the team’s longtime announcer died from cancer, he stayed on for two years there before moving back to Winston-Salem, where he steadily progressed at IMG College (the multimedia rightsholder for sports at more than ninety schools, including Duke; IMG acquired ISP in 2010).
Prior to moving to Durham, Shumate spent the previous five years as IMG’s Director of Audio Operations. His broadcasting experience includes play-by-play duties for the Mid-American Conference championship football game (2010-16), SEC Men’s Basketball Tournament (2011-17) and SEC Baseball Tournament (2013-17). Shumate also handled basketball play-by-play responsibilities for Auburn, Connecticut, Duke, Oregon, Pittsburgh, Vanderbilt, Washington, and West Virginia between 2011-17.
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4/19/23 – Special Guest Speaker to be announced
5/3/23 – Another Special Guest Speaker to be announced
5/17/23 – Yet Another Special Guest Speaker to be announced
Our guest speaker for this meeting will be Chris Pollard, Head Baseball Coach at Duke. While at Duke, Pollard has coached more than 33 Major League Baseball Draft picks, 16 All-ACC selections, four Freshmen All-Americans and three All-Americans. In addition, he has led the program to two Super Regionals (2018, 2019) and an ACC Baseball Tournament Championship title (2021), each the first in program history. Duke reached three consecutive postseasons (2018, 2019, 2021) for the first time in program history and his first postseason appearance in 2016 broke a 55- year drought. In 2021, Pollard became the first Duke coach to reach 100 career ACC wins, becoming one of six active head coaches to achieve that mark at the time.
Our guest speaker for next meeting will be Professional and UNC Basketball player, Tyler Zeller. As a freshman at UNC he played on the 2009 national championship team, and as a senior was an All-American and the Atlantic Coast Conference Player of the Year. Following college, Zeller was a first-round draft pick of the Dallas Mavericks then traded that same night to the Cleveland Cavaliers. He played 2 seasons with Cleveland, 3 seasons with the Boston Celtics, and had stints with the Milwaukee Bucks, the Atlanta Hawks, the Memphis Grizzlies and the San Antonio Spurs. He was named to the NBA’s All- Rookie team following his first season in Cleveland.
Our guest speaker for next meeting will be Dan Brooks, Head Women’s Golf Coach at Duke University. In 38 years as the coach of the Duke Blue Devils, he has helped guide his squads to seven NCAA National Championships, 21 ACC Championships and 140 team victories, which is the most of any women’s golf coach in Division I history. Other accomplishments include a final ranking of No. 1 seven years in a row (2001-07); 10 straight top 10 finishes at the NCAA Championship from 2001-10; a final No. 1 ranking in 2021 and much more. To learn more about Brooks and all of his accomplishments, go to https://goduke.com/sports/womens-golf/roster/coaches/dan-brooks/4464
Our guest speaker for this meeting will be Lewis Bowling, speaking on the history of Duke football. Bowling is an author of numerous local and sports history books, including Duke Basketball: A Pictorial History, Alabama Football Tales, North Carolina Central University Athletics – A History of the Eagles, and Wallace Wade: Championship Years at Alabama and Duke. He has also written books about the history of Granville County and Oxford in particular – part of the “Images of America: North Carolina” series of books.
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11-2-22, Jim Dodson, Author
Our guest speaker for this meeting will be Jim Dodson, author of numerous books about golf. His critically-acclaimed and bestselling books include Final Rounds, Faithful Travelers, The Dewsweepers, Beautiful Madness, The Road to Somewhere, A Golfer’s Life (with Arnold Palmer), Ben Hogan – An American Life, which won the Herbert Warren Wind/USGA International Book Award for 2004. In 2008, he was a featured commentator in the award-winning HBO documentary “Back Nine at Cherry Hills.”