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A handful of students are taking a trip through Granville sports history one piece of memorabilia at a time.
The students, Jamie Hicks, Mike Resetar and Emily Fuller, have been digging in cupboards and closets all over the building discovering sports awards from past decades and looking to shed some light on Golden Horde history.
Some of that digging has been pretty dirty work, they said.
“There were about 12 boxes of trophies and they were all full of dust and covered with dust – it was so disgusting,” Resetar said.
Granville High School Principal Scott Bojanich said he started the effort after the new trophy case was finished outside the high school cafeteria. Bojanich said he wants to make the school’s sporting history more visible to the students and visitors and more accessible to anyone who wishes to look.
The new display space provides more shelves and will allow many of the school’s trophies to come out of storage. By way of example the three pulled out two football trophies from the early 1930s, 1931 and 1934, and a baseball trophy from the middle 1970s Northern Conference.
Each remarked that they were struck by how much more substantial and sturdy the older awards were, like the metal footballs or the heavy wooden base on the baseball trophy.
Newer awards will go into the case outside of the gymnasium while trophies from the past, grouped by sport, will decorate the shelves outside the cafeteria. The gymnasium case will have awards rotated over time to keep the most current sports awards only in that case.
“They’ll be set up better so people can check them out,” Fuller said.
Over the past few weeks the trio has been collecting the awards in the conference room near the main office, sorting and cleaning each trophy to get them ready for what could be their first time in public view in many years.
On Friday, Feb. 10, the students said the earliest trophy they had come across was awarded for running. It was a cross-country award from 1927.
“We’ve found everything from modified seventh grade girls (trophies) to sectional title plaques,” Hicks said. “We’re going to hang up the sectional plaques.”
During study halls and other free periods the three have chased down most of the trophies in the school, although they said coaches have many recent awards with them because there had been no place to put the awards before now.
“There are a lot more than I thought there would be, there will be whole boxes we can’t use,” Fuller said.
The students have made a few discoveries. They found a wooden plaque for the “Bill Owens Award,” which had winner from 1972 to 1978 and then stopped. The Sam Eppolito Award, given out for the best senior male and female athlete, was a trophy before it was a plaque –the last winner: Peg O’Brien. Fuller said it looked like the award was not given to female athletes before 1978.
“It’s just kind of cool to go back and see all of the trophies all of the way back into school history,” Resetar said.
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