Colts bid adieu to historic home
O.T. hoops win caps gym's colourful history
Don Fennell, Sports Editor
They bid farewell to an old friend Tuesday. And for people like Pasha Bains, Sandy Brodie and Marnie Maitland it was as if time stood still as they watched their beloved Richmond Colts win another high school boys' basketball game, the last one in the venerable old Colt Corral at Richmond Secondary School slated to face the wrecking ball next month.
"It's going to be strange (watching them play in the new gym)," Brodie said a half hour before the Colts tipped off against Surrey's Queen Elizabeth Royals.
Many echoed his sentiments.
"But it ended the way it was supposed to," Colt assistant coach Ron Putzi exclaimed immediately following Richmond's 68-63 overtime victory. "This was great."
Putzi engineered many highlights in the old gym during his playing days, leading the Colts to back-to-back provincial championships in 1987 and 1988. But as the team's theme song "Long Time" by Boston blared in the background, Putzi (who went on to play for Canada's national team) reflected on the emotional warm-ups that helped pump up the team for games.
"We were in the tunnel (the hall adjacent to the gym stage) when it started up and our hearts were already beating heavily," he said. "By mid-song the euphoria was second to none. What a high for kids."
Another ex-national team player also has fond memories of being in the gym, especially when the box-like structure was overflowing with fans. Al Chappel said during the heart of the Richmond-Steveston rivalry in the early 1980s, after both had won their first B.C. titles, the games were sold out well in advance. Sometimes however a few entrepreneurial sorts would try to take advantage and scalped $3 tickets for as much as $35.
A friend of Richmond coach Bill Disbrow, Chappel said the low gym ceiling created a unique atmosphere, putting the fans close to the action. Coupled with its dramatically smaller playing surface (48 by 72 feet as opposed to the regulation 50 by 84 feet), opposing teams frequently found the Colt dome a hostile environment.
But Disbrow made sure it was an advantage for the Colts, designing a game plan that featured a high-octane fast-break offence and an aggressive in-your-face defence. It helped to make Richmond High the perennial provincial power for the second half of the 1980s and part of the 1990s.
But the Richmond High gym didn't always have such mystique. Not when it came to hoops, anyway. Clearly, Disbrow was the architect. You could say it was the house that Bill built.
Disbrow was a third-year student at the University of B.C. when he arrived at Richmond High in the fall of 1972. The Colts had won just one game the previous season and Bob Jackson hoped to turn around the program's fortunes. Himself only on the job as a physical education teacher at the school a few months, Jackson contacted the Point Grey campus which recommended Disbrow for the coaching position.
Gymnastics, believe it or not, was the dominant sport at Richmond High in the late 1960s when Jeff Lochbaum was a student there. Later a teacher and three-time coach of provincial champion football teams at the school, he remembers coming to the big gym shows while a junior high school student at R.C. Palmer.
And he remembers something else about the old Richmond High gym: the brightly-coloured bleachers.
"It looked like a rainbow," Lochbaum laughed. "There was a red and orange which fit in well with the psychedelic 60s."
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