The Wolfpacker: An Independent Magazine Covering NC State Sports
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JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 ■ 49 Jay had played in a regulation game, thereby burning one of his three years of college basketball participation. Sermon and Jay protested that the game had been an exhibition scrimmage, one that to this day is not included among NC State's results for the 1931-32 season. After weeks of discussion, Jay was declared ineligible for the rest of the season and the Red Terrors finished 10th in the 23-team Southern Conference standings. Jay began graduate school in accounting, but made side money of- ficiating high school and small college basketball games. In 1940, he was part of the pool of officials for Raleigh's Southern Conference Tournament, calling three games in the four-day event and serving as the official scorer in others. That was the last season for Sermon, who was essentially forced to retire through political wrangling by donor Dave Clark as athletics director in 1937 and as basketball coach in 1940. He was replaced by Bob Warren, who had played on NC State's 1927 Southern Con- ference champion football team and its 1929 basketball champions. One of Warren's first moves was to hire Jay part-time as his fresh- man team coach, ending Jay's officiating career. Warren, highly respected among State alumni and the Raleigh business community, put to- gether two good teams, thanks to the arrival of Durham's Horace "Bones" McKinney. In 1941-42, behind McKinney's scoring, the Ter- rors won 15 games, finished fourth in the regular season and advanced to the Southern Confer- ence title game for the first time since 1929. In August 1942, Warren was one of three NC State coaches drafted for military service, with Warren being commissioned as a lieuten- ant in the U.S. Navy. He was sent to Georgia, where he helped train aircraft carrier pilots for the war's duration. McKinney, meanwhile, was drafted into the Army and shipped down to Fort Bragg, where he spent most of the war playing for the Army training team. That left the Red Terrors in Jay's hands, and again he suffered hard times. Since NC State was an Army training school, students on cam- pus for military training were not allowed to participate in varsity sports, unlike the Naval trainees at North Carolina and Duke, which fielded regular varsity teams as well as Navy training teams. NC State had to rely on freshmen too young for mili- tary service and students who were deemed unfit for military service. "Coach Jay was a part-timer," the late Fred Swartzberg, a player on that team, said in a 2005 interview. "We played in old Thompson Gym. It was a good time all around, but we weren't very successful. We went down to Fort Bragg and played Bones' team down there. They beat the hell out of us." Plus, both Warren and Jay took their jobs despite heavy opposition from Clark, a Charlotte textile publisher who wielded great influence on athletics. Clark ran a highly questionable — but approved — stu- dent loan program for athletes in the 1930s that ran afoul of NC State and UNC Consolidated System guidelines. He would essentially give full-tuition stipends to student-athletes through the Delaware Student Loan Corporation without the expectation of being paid back. Clark was incensed that Jay was named to succeed Warren and demanded that Jay work out a payment plan to repay his student loan. Jay, who had a full-time job as a planner at the North Carolina Highway Commission, made just $600 for his six-month coaching contracts with the school. Clark forced him to pay $150 per year to the loan corporation. In the decade-long history of the Delaware fund, Jay was the only former player to ever pay any money back. Jay had a rough go of it as head coach, posting four consecutive losing seasons (7-9, 5-13, 10-11 and 6-12). He lost four of the five games he coached in the Southern Conference Tournament. He often had to wait for football season to end for his best players to join the squad. He never had a stable roster with anything other than cast-off players, as NC State's campus was fully mobilized for war prepara- tion and barely interested in athletics. To add to the indignity, McKinney, Swartzberg, Bernie Mock and other players who left NC State at the beginning of the war returned to play at Carolina instead of their original school. After the war, NC State was ripe for a total athletics overhaul. Beattie Feathers took a chance in the middle of the war by taking a part-time position as head football coach, a job that eventually turned into a full-time job. He led the Wolfpack to its first-ever bowl appearance, the 1947 Ga- tor Bowl. When the campus population swelled with returning military veterans, the athletics depart- ment split from the physical education depart- ment, with alum John Van Glahn becoming ath- letics director. He hired a new baseball coach, former major league pitcher Vic Sorrell, and a young swimming coach named Willis Casey. "And the old familiar cry of wait until next year rings over the campus," wrote the editor of the 1946 Agromeck yearbook about basket- ball. "And if certain rumors that are circulating come true then there will be bigger and better things on the court NEXT YEAR." Jay got the hint, admitting that moonlighting as a college basketball coach while holding a full-time state job was never going to be a recipe for success. In June 1947, the school hired Ever- ett Case to lead the basketball program. He led the school to nine conference titles in 10 years, including 29 wins in 30 tournament games. It didn't take long, 75 years ago, for Case to take the program from part-time to big time. Jay, meanwhile, returned to his job with the Highway Commis- sion, where he spent the next four decades in the planning office and had little to do with college athletics. There's no record of him attending games or celebrating the success that followed in the de- cades after his dismissal. "I never heard the name," said a legendary player under Case. "I don't know anything about the program during the war." "Don't know anything about him," said a Case-era athletics em- ployee in charge of publicity. Jay died on Oct. 29, 1986, leaving requests for donations to be made to the Lake Waccamaw Boys Club in Columbus County and to the new organ fund at South Hill's Baptist Church on Raleigh's Clark Avenue, where he and his family were longtime members. ■ Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ ncsu.edu. During his playing career in the early to mid- 1930s, Jay was the best player on NC State's basketball team. He later coached the squad for four years, immediately preceding the hiring of the legend Everett Case. PHOTO COURTESY AGROMECK