Anniversary golden for Yellow Jackets' state hoops champs

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Anniversary golden for Yellow Jackets' state hoops champs

Dave Rogers’ column for Thursday, March 15

The Port Arthur News

As if having three Southeast Texas teams reach the state finals in the same year for the first time wasn't enough, there was something else special about last week's Texas high school boys' state tournament from the Port Arthur standpoint.

It was the 50th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's state championship basketball season.

The 1957 Yellow Jackets, coached by Pete Pense and anchored by future Texas A&M All-American Carroll Broussard, defeated Pampa 67-51 for the Class 4A title, which was then the state's largest classification.

Seniors James Sharp, Jerry Franklin, Gene Best and James Woollen combined with Broussard, a 6-foot-5 junior center, to post a 34-4 record that season. The Jackets swept their District 11-4A competition, then beat Houston Milby,

Galena Park and Highland Park in playoff games leading up to the state championship match.

Broussard, a future Southwest Conference most valuable player, was joined by four new starters in 1958 and the Jackets went back to the title game. This time they lost to the West Texans from Pampa by a point, 48-47, to wrap up a

35-4 season.

"There was a period of about five years in there that we were just as tough as a boot," Pense told me in 2000.

TJ had been to the state tournament in 1949 under Fred Mahler and in 1951 under Bud Tomlin, finishing fourth and tied for fifth, respectively. Under Pense, who coached the Jackets from 1952 to 1963, TJ won the 1956 district

championship before losing to Milby in the playoffs.

Don Coleman, who had played for Tomlin in 1951, was Pense's assistant coach. He helped nurture Broussard as the Jackets' junior varsity coach. He left TJ in 1958 to start a 35-year head coaching career, mostly at Houston Memorial, that saw him rack up 892 career wins. Spring Branch's coliseum is named after him.

James Sharp, a guard on the 1957 state champs, returned to TJ as a coach and led the 1970 Yellow Jackets to a district championship, the first since Pense's final playoff squad of 1962.

It turned out to be the last district basketball title for TJ, which was consolidated with Port Arthur's other high schools to form Memorial after the 2002 season.

After 1970, the Jackets' had a 30-year playoff drought, which was broken by a 2000 squad led by coach James Knowles and center Brannon Hayes. That same 2000 team provided TJ its fifth and final state tourney appearance, ending a 43-year absence in Austin.

Under Knowles, the Jackets appeared in the playoffs each of the school's final three seasons as a district runnerup.