Rock Hill’s new sports and event center to host first major college basketball event
Rock Hill will be on display for a national audience again.
The city’s sports and event center, a facility that has hosted high-profile AAU basketball tournaments and Rock Hill school district graduations and that opened for public use in 2020 with the promise of delivering robust economic impact, will host its first major college basketball tournament in December.
The No Room For Racism Classic — a name referring to a relic of Doug Echols’ 1998-2017 tenure as Rock Hill mayor, who coined the phrase “No Room for Racism” — will put on four college basketball games over three days, all of which featuring state of South Carolina men’s basketball teams including Winthrop, Clinton College, South Carolina State and USC.
The Gamecocks will play Florida State in the nightcap of the event’s last day and will be nationally televised.
“It’s huge to have this event,” said Billy Dunlap, CEO of marketing destination organization Visit York County on Thursday morning after an introductory press conference in the sports center. He told reporters that the event took about a year-and-a-half to plan from start to finish. “Any time you get college basketball programs that are at this caliber, and you can host them in such a great facility, it’s a win-win for everybody.”
Mayor John Gettys, who was also in attendance Thursday, echoed Dunlap’s sentiment. He added that the sports center is “170,000 square feet of economic energy” and athletic opportunity — all of which will be put on display in December.
“One of the things that was striking to me in these interviews with these coaches is most of them had been here before. So they’d been here before at these AAU tournaments, watching these high school kids and others come to Rock Hill,” Gettys told reporters Thursday. He added: “We have $2.5 billion in development going on at the Panthers center, we have almost a billion in downtown Rock Hill, and now what we’re trying to do with the city is pull that around to the south side of Rock Hill, where we can see all this growth mean something to all the people of Rock Hill.”
All eyes on Rock Hill
From Dec. 10-12, fans inside the sports center will see some high-level basketball. They’ll also see the unveiling of “a project to preserve the legacy of civil rights leaders and provide long standing educational value to the public,” per an event release.
But those tuning in around the country will get a chance to learn about Rock Hill itself.
Rock Hill is a city fiercely independent from its northern metropolis neighbor of Charlotte. It’s a city with a blossoming sports tourism industry — one thanks to a bunch of recent developments, including the aforementioned sports center and the Carolina Panthers practice facility that’ll be reportedly ready for NFL training camp by 2023.
And it’s a city with its own mixed but rich civil rights legacy.
During this basketball event in December, expect to hear about the Friendship Nine, a group of teens in 1961 who helped spark a national civil rights movement against segregation in South Carolina and America. Nine students from Friendship Junior College in Rock Hill spent a month in the York County jail after being convicted of trespassing after they sat at an all-white segregated lunch counter. (The powerful nonviolent protest came in the same year that the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis was beaten nearly to death in Rock Hill, when he was a member of the “Freedom Riders.” Lewis magnanimously forgave one of the men who beat him up in a remarkable showing of grace in 2009.)
“In 1961, I was only 10 years old when the Friendship Nine did what they did,” Tubby Smith told The Herald at the event.
Smith — the head coach at High Point, which will play S.C. State in the event — is a trailblazer for Black basketball coaches across the country. He was the first Black head coach at Kentucky and won a national championship in his first season there.
But on Thursday, seated alongside other coaches of color (like Florida State’s Leonard Hamilton, Clinton College’s Tony Madlock and others) that were undoubtedly inspired by him, he focused on others who helped pave a way for him.
He mentioned Gene Littles, the former coach of the Charlotte Hornets and the first Black student who lived on High Point’s campus. He mentioned Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson and Temple’s John Chaney.
“Before me, there were pioneers, and people paved the way for Tubby Smith to get jobs,” he said. He added that events like this are important because they keep conversations about racism in the public’s view. “Basketball has had our ups and downs, but you can’t find a better place for racial equality than in sports, and we’ve seen it over the years, what it’s meant, especially in basketball.”
Winthrop basketball to play
The Winthrop Eagles will play in the tournament, and new head coach Mark Prosser was in the sports center on Thursday.
“It was just striking to just be sitting up with some of the best coaches in the country, no matter which school they came from, or where they’re from,” he said. He added that the conversation of race and racial equality, “as the coaches sort of alluded to, (is) very much needed right now.”
The Eagles will play Carver College, a school that plays an independent schedule that technically resides in the National Christian College Athletic Association. That game will fill out an already busy December for Winthrop — one that’ll see non-conference games against Hartford, Coastal Carolina, Furman, Elon, Mississippi State and Converse College. (It’s worth mentioning that USC coach Frank Martin, who was also at the event, joked at the presser that his one request when agreeing to play in the tournament was that he wouldn’t play Winthrop, a mid-major program with the understood propensity to defeat high-major teams.)
“(This event) is a testament to this area for investing in a building like this, an event center like this, that we have the capability to do something on a national level that we’re able to do,” Prosser told The Herald in an interview. “It means a lot to us to represent that, and that’s why we wanted so badly to be in this event.”
No Room For Racism Classic game lineup
- Dec. 10: SC State vs. High Point
- Dec. 11: Winthrop vs. Carver College
- Dec. 12: Clinton College vs. Edward Watters
- Dec. 12: South Carolina vs. Florida State
This story was originally published September 16, 2021 at 10:29 AM.
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