When the sport of basketball finally reached upper East Tennessee, there was one District formed.  It included every school from Kingsport to Stoney Creek and Roan Mountain. 

Sullivan County Schools along with Washington County, Carter County and Johnson County made up Region One of the TSSAA outline. 

Schools with 1500 students played in the same division as schools with 150-200 students. When a coach made out his schedule, it included Erwin, Science Hill and Kingsport. 

When it come time to play the district, you had to beat the big schools to win the district. Not even Hampton who won the state tournament won the district. 

The layout changed in 1974 when the TSSAA went to two divisions.  Large school and small school would separate the teams into two divisions and Charlie Bayless took advantage of the separation.   

He won the first ever small school state title and is Happy Valley’s all-time winningest coach.

Mary Hughes was one of the smaller schools in Sullivan County but a great sports mind, Dwight Mason, would come along in the mid-’70s and teach the Lions how to win. 

In Mason’s first season, he won 22 games and in twelve years record nearly 200 wins for the school. He became the longest running coach at Mary Hughes High School. 

Ernie Wolf would be Hughes all-time leading scorer racking up 1,619 points and Bill Wilson would finish his career with 1,611.

Bluff City was known for a great coach, Charlie Flemming, who was Mr. Basketball. He coached 21 years and won over 300 games and led the Grizzlies coaching in every sport. 

He went on to be Sullivan East’s first Athletic Director before retiring.

He played on Science Hill’s first unbeaten football team in 1932 and led them in scoring with 12 touchdowns. It was a record that stood for over twenty years.

Holston Valley had a coach, Harmon Peters, who stayed for 34 years and recorded 31 wins in 1971. He coached some great players including Bobby Hogsett. 

He retired a few years before the school was closed as a high school.

Cloudland had only 12 coaches in four decades before the year 2000. Great men like Dennis Greenwell who won 121 games for the Highlanders. 

Bill Birchfield who is most certainly one of the best athletes ever to play for Cloudland coached four years. 

Hampton legend Jerry White was there for two years while Dallas Williams spent four years and coached great players like Tony Church and Grady Hill. 

Elizabethton’s Eddie Carver and Science Hill’s Greg Goulds spent two years each as head coach. Doug Blevins, John Hyatt, Todd Barnett to name a few went on to coach other schools being very successful in basketball. 

Hyatt also coached five years at Unaka as did Williams when he left Cloudland.  Birchfield also coached football and averaged 13 wins a season, basketball’s best record of the 11 coaches. 

Paul Heaton won the 1953-54 scoring mark with 461 points, Jim Archer in ‘64-65 with a 14.3 points per game average and Sam Rogers led them for two years, ‘67-69, scoring 562 points and 623 his senior year for a 21.1 average.

Grady Hill would top 700 points in ‘73-74 for a 25.0 average to be tops in average and a single-season scoring.

Hyatt, who went to coach at Unaka, saw his winning-games total go to 139 and coached maybe Unaka’s best player Eddie Holly. 

Holly led the conference twice in scoring averaging 16.9 his junior year and 23.4 his senior season. 

At the time the 632 points Holly scored was the school’s best. He scored a game-high 43 points. 

Raymond Lowe was the first league conference scoring winner averaging 20.8 points per game and it was known then as the Appalachian Conference. Richard Hodge was the champ in ‘61-62 with a 22.2 average and scored 557 points. 

Other coaches at Unaka were Lynn Goddard, Claude Holsclaw, Duard Aldridge, Ted Maxwell. Coaches spending one year on the hardwood was Ronnie Taylor, Lynn Tipton and Sam Greenwell. 

Don Threldkeld, a Milligan basketball star, was there three years before Ronnie Snavely took them to their first state tournament appearance in 1985 and again in 1988. 

He coached for eleven years before one of his players Donald Ensor won the state in 2004 for the Rangers.

Only three coaches were at Happy Valley High School in 65 years. A.L. Treadway who won the state in 1950, Charlie Bayless who won the state in 1974, and Carl Gouge. 

Danny Webster may have been one of the best Warrior scoring 40 points in one game and 41 in another. Doug Verable scored over 1,200 points and Marty Street tallied 1,194. 

Bayless had five seasons where he won nearly 30 games after he started coaching at Jonesboro in 1951. Bayless played in two state tournaments for the Warriors, 1941 and 1942, and lost in the quarterfinals.  Bill Arnett was named on the All-State squad that year.

Hampton’s Buck Van Huss was 33-years old before he started coaching high school basketball and his first season would be the only one he would record a losing record. 

By his fifth year as head coach, he took the Bulldogs to a school record of 41 wins and that record would be broken two years later when he led the ‘Dogs to a State title and a 44-game winning season. 

Van Huss won 404 games in seven years at Hampton and ended his career in Kingsport with 1,021 wins—the states best. 

Hampton ranks as one of the top teams in wins for basketball programs as a small school and recorded over 1,000 wins before the year 2000. 

Jerry White is the current all-time winningest coach with over 750 wins. 

Some Hampton greats were Milburn Ellis who is the schools all-time scoring leader with 2,308 points while Barry Phillips scored over 1,800 points in his career. 

Willie Malone and White played on the 60’ state title team with Malone totaling 1,545 points and White finishing with 1,539. 

Craig Fair scored over 1,600 and has the schools single-game record at 48.  Jack Waycaster and Malone each scored 43 points in games.

At Elizabethton, they would only have five coaches in 46-years. 

Treadway, by far, is the strongest with over 800 wins in 23 years. Len Dugger was there for 16 years before coming back in the mid-2000s.

Harley Swift coached for one year as well as Larry White and Tony Hardin. Treadway’s best year was 1952-53 when he won 32 games with only six losses. 

Dugger won nearly 300 games and led the Cyclones to the state in ‘82-83 winning the regional and going 2-1 in the state. 

Hardin would also take the Cyclones to a state tournament appearance. Treadway won 10 regionals and Dugger won eight. Keith Turner took the scoring honors in the ‘82-83 season. 

The Cyclones finished second in 1941, third in 1942, and third in 1948 in the state tournament.