BWF Book Signing Features Spencer's History
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (September 24, 2013)
Huntington author to sign new book on the history of sports in West Virginia at the Black Walnut Festival
Huntington
author, Bob Barnett, will sign his new book, Hillside Fields: A History
of Sports In West Virginia (West Virginia University Press, 2013) at
the Black Walnut Festival in Spencer on Friday, October 11 from 11 to 3.
Barnett will be located in front of the Courthouse.
Hillside
Fields: A History of Sports in West Virginia has the Spencer girls’
state basketball story at the beginning of the chapter on the history of
girl’s and women’s’ sports in West Virginia. The Spencer tournament
founded in 1919 was one of the three first girls’ state basketball
tournaments started in the United States that season. Barnett and
Spencer historian Steven Cooper will also sign copies of their
co-authored Goldenseal magazine story about the Spencer girls’
tournament.
Hillside
Fields provides a broad view of the development of sports in West
Virginia. Of course the stories about Jerry West and Mary Lou Retton,
and “We are…Marshall” are familiar to everyone. But the little known
stories of the development of sports from the first golf club in America
at Oakhurst Links to the Greenbrier Classic; from the first girls’
basketball championship in 1919 to post-Title IX; from racially
segregated sports to integrated teams; and from the days when West
Virginia Wesleyan and Davis & Elkins beat the big boys in football,
help to define the uniqueness of being a West Virginian. Hillside Fields
explains how major national trends and events, as well as West
Virginia’s economic and political conditions, influenced the development
of sports in the state.
Roane and Gilmer County athletes, coaches,
and teams appear throughout the book. Normantown’s state championship
basketball championship victory over Logan in 1945 and the major role of
Glenville State College (now University) in the founding of the West
Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference basketball tournament are
both featured.
“I tried to cover all of the major athletes
and events like Jerry West and Mary Lou Retton,” said Barnett. “But
because West Virginia is a state of small cities, small towns, and even
smaller villages may of the local legends are not widely known and in
danger of fading from memory. I tried to capture as many of those as
possible in Hillside Fields because they are what help define the
character of West Virginia.”
Barnett graduated from Marshall
University in 1965 and returned to Marshall to teach in 1972 after
earning a PhD from Ohio State University. He taught sport history
classes in the Division of Exercise Science for 35 years.
Barnett’s
first book Growing Up in the Last Small Town: A West Virginia Memoir is
about coming of age in the tiny northern panhandle town of Newell, West
Virginia in the 1950’s. He and his wife, Lysbeth, have two children and
six grandchildren. They now divide their time between homes in
Huntington and Sarasota, Fla.
For more information, contact the author:
304-523-3901 Huntington, WV
Or by e-mail at barnettink@aol.com