Vicksburg High center Michael Phelps (24) dribbles downcourt in this 1979 game against Bentonia at Vicksburg High. Phelps, then a junior, and the rest of the Gators won the state championship the following season, the last boys basketball championship for the school. The 1979-80 team beat Callaway for the Class-AA state title, then knocked off South Leake for the overall title. Tonight at 8 p.m., this year’s group of Vicksburg Gators will play Starkville for the Class 5A state title at the Mississippi Coliseum. (File photo The Vicksburg Post)

[3/7/03] It’s hard to see the ghosts when you walk into the old Vicksburg High gym. The knowing whispers are there, the voices reminding one another of the time Michael White hit a free throw to help the Gators escape an upset bid by Warren Central, or how Michael Phelps dropped 29 points on Callaway in the state championship game.

But there is no championship banner for their breath to blow. The gold basketball that was once hoisted high in the air that March night in the Mississippi Coliseum sits among dozens of other minor trophies in a hallway outside the gym.

With Vicksburg High back in the state title game for the first time in 23 years, however, the voices have grown louder. There aren’t many reminders of the 1980 state championship team, but no one has ever forgotten.

“To myself, to see what we accomplished back then and to see now how long it took a team to get back to State, it’s something special that we all talk about when we get together,” said Phelps, a scoring machine who averaged 24.2 points per game and totaled an astonishing 1,088 points in the 1979-80 season. “We have it in our heart, we have it in our minds. When we get in touch with each other, it goes back to 1980, going up and down the highways and what we accomplished.”

A bond and a boycott

The seeds of a championship team were put in place long before that group of Gators ever set foot in Vicksburg’s gym.

The 1979-80 team featured seven seniors who grew up playing basketball together at the Jackson Street YMCA. They lost fewer than five games in two seasons of junior high ball, then shocked the state by advancing to the Class AA semifinals in 1978 as sophomores.

The team formed a special bond that was closer to that of brothers rather than teammates.

“Everywhere they went, they were going together. If there was a dance or something, the entire basketball team would be there together,” said Lanier coach Thomas Billups, who was an assistant at Vicksburg from 1976-87 and has won four state titles since taking over at the Jackson school.

A loss in the Class AA semifinals ended the championship dream in 1978, and Vicksburg lost to Murrah in the first round of the district tournament the following season. With one last chance at a state title, there was little question the Gators would be one of the teams to beat heading into the 1979-80 season.

“Going into our senior year, we pretty much expected to win a state championship,” said Jim Hill coach Fred Harris, who was a starter for Vicksburg in 1979. “We had it set in our minds that we were going to win it. We had been together since the eighth or ninth grade, and we set our minds to accomplishing that.”

Vicksburg started the season ranked No. 9, and quickly rose to the top of the polls.

The Gators avenged an early-season, one-point loss to top-ranked Murrah with a convincing 87-70 win in the Warren Central Classic, one of seven tournaments VHS won during the season.

By early January Vicksburg was ranked No. 2 and had compiled a 23-2 record, but the ride up wasn’t entirely smooth.

Early in the season, the players boycotted a practice after a disagreement with their coaches. Head coach Scott Dyson had a simple rule, and he followed it to the letter no practice, no play. Rather than bend the rule, Dyson forfeited a game against Greenwood to give VHS one of its two early-season losses.

“I still think we did the right thing,” Harris said, declining to elaborate on the specifics of the disagreement. “Us being kids, we had it in our minds that some things were not right and just decided that we were not going to go to practice.”

With the team threatening to come apart at the seams, Billups helped it avoid disaster. He gathered the players and coaches together for an emergency meeting, and they talked out their differences.

“I don’t want to take credit for it, but I went back and got the guys and talked to the guys, and we worked it out,” Billups said. “After we solved everything … we kind of changed things and got back into the gym and started working.”

Although he felt the players gained the respect of coaches and supporters with the boycott, Harris said Billups and Dyson were a lot more forgiving than he would be if his current players tried the same thing.

“They’d be gone,” Harris said with a laugh. “It wouldn’t even be any use coming back.”

With the power struggle settled, the Gators could return their focus to basketball and another season-long struggle with an archrival.