Sports scene: Flying high

              Sports Scene
Flying high
The 1970 basketball season came
early for the Guilford Quakers. Very
early. For head coach Jerry Steele
and five players from his nationally
ranked team, the season started June
23.
Location: West Africa.
For ail-American center David
Smith, the season started July 5.
Location: the Air Force and Naval
Academies where select athletes tried
out for upcoming Olympic, Pan-
American, and World University
Games.
Coach Steele and five of his conference champions who finished fourth
in the NAIA national tournament accepted an invitation from the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics to serve as good will ambassadors on a six-week West African
tour sponsored by the U. S, State
Department.
Accompanying Steele are sophomores M. L. Carr and Ted East; juniors Tom Ennis and Jerry Crocher;
and senior Bert Feik.
All are from North Carolina except
Crocker who is from New York.
Flying first to Washington to meet
with State Department officials, they
were wished well by Senator B. Everett Jordan of North Carolina and
Congressman L. Richardson Preyer
of Greensboro. Among those also waving good-by as they flew from Washington was the executive director of
the NAIA, Al Duer, who came all the
way from Kansas City to personally
see them off.
Coach Steele's first post card from
West Africa reported the tour was
going well. Arriving first in Dakar,
capital of Senegal, the Quakers met
the Senegalese team made up of the
best players from amateur groups and
sports clubs in the nation.
With Dakar as headquarters, the
visiting Americans made trips to
other Senegalese towns such as Zi-
guinchor, Thies, and Kaolack for
games, exhibitions, and clinics. Since
most of the courts were expected to
be out of doors, the team took with it
some fifty outdoor basketballs for
presentation to the host groups.
Travel was not always easy. For
instance, it took the Steele-men eight
hours to go by jeep and ferry from
Dakar to Gambia, a distance of less
than a hundred miles. The coach
noted proudly, however, that the boys
were showing "guts, poise, and determination through a demanding schedule."
A study of the itinerary and a map
of Africa shows that the Quakers are
seeing much of the continent, from
the western coastal nations to the interior to North Africa.
Their schedule calls for stops in
and around Bamako in Mali, Nai-
mey   in   Niger,   Abidjan   in   Ivory
Coast, Douala in Cameroon, Fort
Lamy in Chad, Tripoli in Libya, and
Algiers in Algeria.
If the schedule remains as planned,
Coach Steele and his good will ambassadors will fly from Algiers to
New York City on August 4, reaching the Greensboro-High Point-Winston-Salem Airport near Guilford College the following day.
While his teammates were together
in Mali on July 5, David Smith was
a loner as he flew from Greensboro
to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. He was invited there
to take part in the first U. S. Olympic Basketball Planning Program,
set up to give potential Olympic and
Pan-American Games talent an op-
The Guilford basketball team boarded the plane at Greensboro for the first
leg of their six-week good will tour of Africa. Boarding from left to right
are: Bert Feik, Tom Ennis, Jerry Crocker, M. L. Carr, Ted East, followed by
Coach Jerry Steele. The airline hostess is Joy Michaels.
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