The Kids
It was like Christmas in June for generations of young men and women who took part in the camp
Dan Spainhour couldn’t pin down the exact year (“It was 1970-something”), and he thought he may have been 11 or 12 at the time … maybe 13. Those details were hazy. But everything else about his experiences at Campbell Basketball School were crystal clear over 40 years later.
“It was a big day for me. My family loaded up the station wagon, and drove me two hours south to Campbell,” he said. “This was my first experience on a college campus, and if you were a kid in North Carolina who liked basketball, this was the camp. It was the school.”
Spainhour and hundreds of other young men (“It seemed like 1,000”) arrived on Sunday and stayed through Saturday. They slept in dorms with roommates from other parts of the state … some from South Carolina and Virginia or even Georgia and Florida. Their days began with an early breakfast in Marshbanks Cafeteria and a devotional in Turner Auditorium, then drills from 8 to 11, lunch at Marshbanks, drills from 2 to 5, dinner at Marshbanks and drills from 6 to 9 before returning to the dorms for lights out.
The boys, ages 8 to 18, would be split into groups and bussed all over Harnett County to gyms in Erwin, Dunn, Bunnlevel, Lafayette, Lillington and Angier, to name a few. Lessons would cover passing, dribbling, screening, “off- ball movement” and defense.
Their teachers were legends. The counselors, many of them were future legends.
The experience was a dream come true for Spainhour and had an enormous impact on his eventual decision to make basketball his career. He would go on to become a successful high school coach before joining Florida State University as the director of basketball operations. And for the past 25 years, he’s run his own basketball school, East Coast Basketball Camps in Winston-Salem. He’s even penned a book, “How to Run a Basketball Camp: A Guide to Directing a Successful Basketball Camp,” which opens with his Campbell experience.
“Campbell’s camp was way ahead of its time,” he said. “That experience is what I try to offer in my camps. I want them to be fun, but I want the kids to come away having learned something valuable. The focus is on the fundamentals — that’s what I remember most about Campbell as a kid. The teaching. The lectures. Going to a gym on a hot summer day and getting all this knowledge from great coaches. It was hot and miserable, but it was awesome.”
“Coach McCall never imagined how popular this thing had become.”
Twice — when he was 15 and 16 years old — Caulton Tudor answered “Campbell Basketball School” when his parents asked him what he wanted from Santa that year. He was thinking ahead, as June was still a good seven months away in December.
But at that time, forward thinking was necessary to guarantee a spot.
“The camp just took off,” he said. “All of the sudden, if you didn’t get your application in shortly after the new year, you weren’t sure you’d get in.”
At its peak in the 70s and early 80s, Campbell Basketball School was bringing in more than 2,000 kids a year — about 800 boys a week for two weeks and about 400 girls for the third and final week. The camp had become a well-oiled machine, equipped with an army of busses shipping kids, coaches and calendars to every elementary, middle and high school in the county where the students were met by coaches ready to spend the next 90 minutes pounding fundamentals into their heads.
“The one thing they kept telling us is, ‘You’re here to learn basketball,’” said Tudor, who’d go on to a successful career as a sports writer and columnist for the Raleigh News & Observer. “And you learned basketball. Strictly fundamentals. Red Myers [former head coach at Erskine College] ran the Angier camp and taught defensive technique. He didn’t even bring a basketball with him. You worked on defense, footwork and boxing out. You never even saw a basketball.”
One stop was passing. Another was 90 minutes of free throw shooting.
It wasn’t all work and no play. There were games — competitive games — with the best saved for Fridays when that week’s top performers took part in an All-Star game. In the earlier years, students were given a report card at week’s end, grading them on offense, defense and rebounding.
“Fridays, that was your reward. It was basketball, morning, afternoon and night,” Tudor said. “They also handed out superlatives — the Top 10 guys in scoring, passing, rebounding or defense. You got better in all these areas. That was the true mission of the camp.”
For many, the skills they learned and developed were the biggest take-aways from Campbell Basketball School. For others, it was the friendships made.
Susanna Stevens was among the more than 300 girls who attended the camp each year in the early 1990s. A huge basketball fan who went on to play varsity ball in high school, Stevens enjoyed hanging out with other girls who loved the sport as much as she did. In the little free time they had, she and her roommates would organize pick-up games.
“I enjoyed meeting and making new friends,” she said. “One year, I kept in touch with my roommate by letter after camp. I have such great memories from those camps — I liked the small school feel, having independence … I enjoyed going to the cafeteria and eating as much as I wanted. I returned because I loved it. It was definitely the highlight of my summers.”
The coaches loved it, too, according to Danny Roberts, and not just because the camp served as an extra paycheck during the otherwise work-free summer months. Though many of their respective schools faced off against each other from November through March, the coaches were a tight-knit bunch in Buies Creek. Many stayed in the dorms, rooming with their rivals. They ate in Marshbanks with the kids, and enjoyed late- night card games and a few cold ones when the younger visitors were fast asleep.
“We had a great time. There was a lot of laughing,” said Roberts. “And the pranks … once they lit a smoke bomb and tossed it into one of the coaches’ cars, and it looked like it just blew up.”
Coach McCall woke up one morning to find his car — a tiny French Renault that resembled a Volkswagen Beetle — missing in his usual parking spot. Overnight, the other coaches had opened the doors to Carter Gym and rolled the little car to the center of the court.
“Something like that was happening all the time,” Roberts said. “We just all became really good friends. It didn’t matter if you were John Wooden or the coach down at the high school. You were part of the group. I felt like I was working with my friends.”
The friendships were paramount to Campbell Basketball School’s success. But another important factor, according to Roberts, was the kids themselves — kids who were there for not only the experience, but to also learn and become better basketball players.
“To have more than 800 kids in a week and never have a problem is pretty impressive,” he said. “We never had a big fight. They were so tired come 11, we never had a problem getting them to bed. We never even had a wreck on one of those old busses. It just all ran smoothly.”