January 2010

Riding With "King" Kelly Coleman
January 23, 2010:
As a freelance photographer, I seem to land a lot of cool gigs here in Kentucky. But sometimes I go into a shoot not realizing how cool it really is, until the shoot seems to overtake me. Kentucky Living assigned me a story on "Guy Get Aways." It was a story written by Gary P. West, the gentleman on the far right in the photo below.

The story originated with four guys from the Hardin County, one of which was the basketball coach at North Hardin, Ron Bevars. Bevars has won more games than any other active coach in Kentucky right now with 700 plus wins. These guys set out a few years ago to track down some of the great Kentucky high school basketball legends of the 1950s, and to go see some of the old great gyms, that now only live in folk lore.

These gyms are totally different from the ones we have today. There was an intimacy found in these gyms of over a half century ago that rarely exists today. In a lot of the gyms, the only thing that separated the players from the crowd was the sideline.

This particular day, the guys from Hardin County, traveled to Floyd County in Eastern Kentucky, to see the old Wayland Gym. The surprise of this assignment came when the man in the blue sweater rode in the car with me. He is "King" Kelly Coleman, one of the greatest high school players to ever play basketball in the state of Kentucky. He still owns many of the state basketball and Sweet Sixteen records. Coleman has the record for the most career points, by scoring 4,337 for the Wayland Wasps in the mid-1950s.

Although the current owner of the Wayland gym wouldn't let us into the building, I was able to get some interesting photos of the old Wayland High School, that sits like a ghost, overlooking the little mining community of Wayland.

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