SUNO Lady Knights Team Up With Science Major for Day of Service

New Orleans, La. - SUNO's women's basketball team united with members of the Beta Kappa Chi Scientific Honor Society and SUNO's National Institute of Science chapter to lend a helping hand to doing community service at City Park. The SUNO student athletes and science majors visited field number eighteen at Harrison and Marconi Blvds., to help lay down new clay for the softball leagues. The service project took place on Saturday, April 2nd.

"There are going to be a lot of happy players (when they see this)," said Lori Colgan, the Assistant Commissioner of the NOLA Softball League and manager of one of the teams. Colgan said that after the league bought the clay, there was no one to help the leagues do the hard part. She was going to ask the players to do the dirty work, and they would have had to play the next day. Eight leagues use the fields at City Park, inlcuding a youth league.

The SUNO students arrived at 9 a.m., and worked consistently for the next couple of hours. Later in the morning, students from Tulane University arrived to lend their backs to the process to give City Park nearly fifty volunteers on the morning.

The students were joined by Elston King, Athletic Director and Women's Basketball Coach, Roshaun Ambrose, Assistant Women's Basketball Coach, Dr. Murty Kambhampati, Professor of Biology, and Dr. Illya Tietzel, Assistant Professor of Biology.

"This is great!" exclaimed a smiling Jim Morrisson, Volunteer Coordinator of City Park. "You guys really saved the day."

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The NAIA changed basketball, and Kansas City

Alcorn State was minutes away from tipping off a game at the 1974 NAIA Tournament when Braves coach Davey Whitney received a tap on the shoulder from a Municipal Auditorium official.

“Phone call,” he was told. Now? Whitney shooed away the messenger. A few minutes later came another tap. “I was told it was important and I had to take the call,” Whitney said. “So I left the bench and got on the phone.”

On the line was the school president. A bill had just been signed into Mississippi law to grant Alcorn university status. No longer was it Alcorn Agricultural & Mechanical College but Alcorn State University. The president wanted everybody at the NAIA to know.

“We had ’em change the scoreboard,” Whitney said. “It meant a lot to us to be called Alcorn State University at the NAIA. It was where we were welcomed. To us, it was a special place.”

Basketball's African American Pioneers

A forgotten ballplayer walked into a small reception room last week at the Reagan Building, had the privilege of meeting the famous Earl Monroe -- and promptly told the Pearl a story.

While Monroe was becoming NBA royalty in New York, Perry Wallace played for a pittance in the Eastern League, a basketball minor league, and moonlighted as a math teacher at the Pearl's alma mater, Philadelphia's John Bartram High School.

"And at the same time, Joe Bryant -- Kobe's father -- attended that school," Wallace said. "Isn't that something?"

From the Pearl to Perry, to Jellybean Bryant and on to his son, the entire evening became a game of human H-O-R-S-E. They bonded over coincidences and zero degrees of separation, of events of 30, 40 and 50 years ago, all told by living historians before the screening of "Black Magic."



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Bethune Cookman's Chaney part of 'Black Magic'

"BLACK MAGIC" IS ON ESPN AT 9 PM EDT TONIGHT AND MONDAY NIGHT.

John Chaney knows what it's like to be poor.

"People don't really understand poor," says the Hall of Fame basketball coach. "It doesn't mean you have something. It means you have nothing. You're working to make ends meet at all times, and yet there's always someone worse off."

Chaney knows what it's like to be a second-class citizen.

"In the South, when I was growing up, blacks were being arrested for vagrancy if they didn't have money in their pocket," he says. "So my mother always made sure I had a quarter on me."

Chaney knows what it's like to be slighted.

"In 1951, I was the best basketball player in Philadelphia, but I had no scholarship offers," he says. "There were only two schools in the city that had black athletes at the time -- La Salle and Temple. The others had no black basketball players on their teams."

Chaney's story is one of the threads that ties together Dan Klores' four-hour documentary, "Black Magic," which ESPN will air in two parts Sunday and Monday nights without commercial interruption.

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Ex-NBA star remembers when race trumped talent

As a Milwaukee Bucks scout, Bobby Dandridge periodically attends games at the University of Richmond. The Richmond native and former NBA all-star never considered coming to UR as a student, however, because the school's basketball coaches didn't recruit African-Americans during the mid-1960s.

Dandridge, 60 and a former Maggie Walker High School standout, recalled during a visit to UR's Robins Center this season that "We didn't even come to this section of the city. To go to a white school, that wasn't even a thought." Dandridge, a 6-6 forward, went on to play 13 seasons in the NBA. In passing on him, UR had plenty of company. No predominantly white school recruited Dandridge, he said.

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