Their Greatest Season
by Phil Shadid
1931-32
THE GREATEST SEASON IN THE HISTORY OF BATH-LYNCHBURG
The headline above is sometimes subjective, but in 1931-32, the basketball team achieved that status. Coach Maurice Root (a Carthage College graduate) guided the team to a 28-1 record, winning these championships: Mason County tournament, West Central Conference (8-0), Mason City District tournament; plus third place in the Springfield Sectional tourney.
Bath-Lynchburg HS Basketball Team 1938-39
The boys won four games in the County tournament whipping Havana twice and beating Kilbourne and San Jose. The first win over Havana in the tourney was a 6-4 victory. Havana slowed the game greatly because Bath had trampled them 50-5 earlier in the season. They met again, this time in the championship game, with B-L winning 20-8. In the District tournament, tall center Clyde Coddington, Emory Sarff and Gerald Allen took turns leading the team in scoring. They beat Greenview 31-20, Havana 19-9 and secured the title with a 22-19 come-from-behind win over Athens.
They lost their only game of the season in the semi-final of the Sectional at the State Arsenal (a huge castle-like building) on March 18, 1932, a one point loss to Beardstown (21-20). B-L had beaten the Tigers by eight points earlier in the year. Their 27th straight win (the longest undefeated streak in the state) occurred the night before when they beat Jerseyville 34-24, in the Sectional opener. The “Sea Gulls” edged Lincoln 19-18 in the third place game on March 19, thereby establishing themselves as one of the 24 best teams in the state (811 schools had begun district play in March, and only eight teams went to the state finals).
Sports Editor Bob Drysdale of the Springfield State Journal wrote in his column on March 20, 1932: “Volunteers offered to help with writing the headline for the Bath-Lincoln game. There were half a dozen variations of BATH CLEANS LINCOLN SATURDAY NIGHT. Personally, we’d say that Lincoln, which had expected to take Bath, failed to find the stopper, so its game was a washout. But one thing is certain, Bath cleaned up a lot of central Illinois hardwoods before it was stopped in the semi-finals.”
Clyde Coddington along with Gerald Allen paced the team during the season and had plenty of help from Clyde’s brother Floyd, brothers Roy and Emory Sarff, Andrew Lindsay, Thomas Minor, Bazzille Schaeffer, Harry Clemons. For 29 games they averaged beating their opponents by a 26-13 margin. The best team in the history of the school? You bet!
FOOTNOTE: The weekly newspaper “Mason County Democrat” had been using the nickname “Sea Gulls” for Bath-Lynchburg sports teams, but in early 1933, a group of Bath students (40 in all) wrote to the editor and requested they be called the “Ramblers.” The students thought the Ramblers best described their team, and that Sea Gulls meant nothing to the school. The editor said, "OK: Ramblers it is!"
