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North Hills extends swimming win streak

The North Hills Swim and Racquet Club’s Sprinters swim team is continuing its winning ways.

On July 22, the North Hills Sprinters won the City Swim Meet in Parkersburg for the 45th year in the past 46 years.

It was North Hills’ 26th consecutive City Swim Meet title since 1991. The only team to defeat the North Hills swimmers was the Marietta Marlins in 1990.

Linda Alt has been coaching the North Hills swim team in city meets since 1972. She remembers there being 10-11 teams competing for the title at one time.

The City Swim Meet at the YMCA of Parkersburg on July 22 was shortened because of a storm. Seven teams competed: North Hills, Greenmont, Parkersburg Country Club, DuPont, YMCA, Marietta-Williamstown and Point Pleasant.

The summer “novice” league, which lasts for seven weeks, is a “feeder system” for the YMCA of Parkersburg Sharks swim program during the winter, Alt said. Mini-invitationals are held during the summer to determine seeds in the City Swim Meet, Alt told me this week.

Alt was pleased that more swimmers, ages 4 to 18 years old, participated on the North Hills Sprinters this year – 75 compared to 50 last year.

Joining Alt as swim team coaches this year were Preston Padden, head coach for swimmers 11 and up, assisted by David Snider; Tara Foster, head coach for 9-10 year olds, assisted by Kate Snider; and Taylor Foster, head coach for 8 and under, assisted by Katelyn Rexroad.

The secret to the North Hills Sprinters success is the swim lessons program at the North Hills pool, said Alt, who is pool manager. Children learn to swim at 3 to 4 years old in North Hills and are soon ready to join the swim team because they are good swimmers, she said.

When I asked Alt whether she planned to return as swim team coach next year, she said, “I think so. I have too much fun.”

***

David Kurtz is looking forward to attending the Parkersburg High School Centennial Celebration, Aug. 25-29, after spending the past two years working in the Peace Corps on the Caribbean island of Dominica.

Kurtz, who has been a teacher in Dominica, helped the Thibaud Village Council receive a grant from the U.S. charity “Courts for Kids” to build a basketball court in the community.

The court, which was finished in July, will be used for netball/tennis/volleyball, along with basketball and as a setting for fairs and ceremonies. New soccer goals with nets were built as part of the project, Kurtz said in an email.

A work crew of 23 Americans helped to build the court.

This was the first time this charity has selected a proposal from the Eastern Caribbean to fund, said Kurtz, a 1976 graduate of Parkersburg High School.

“It was a lot of work, but it was the perfect capstone on my two years of service here,” said Kurtz, who is flying back to the United States on Aug. 19.

Kurtz, who retired from the Bureau of the Fiscal Service in Parkersburg, is writing a blog of his adventures in the Caribbean at kuribbean.blogspot.com.

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Bud Taylor is proud of his grandfather A.C. Taylor, who was Parkersburg High School’s first tennis coach in 1927.

A.C. Taylor led PHS to a record of 100 wins and only eight losses from 1927 to 1938. PHS won several state tennis titles during this time.

Bud, 87, of Parkersburg, said his grandfather got his 100th win in his last year as the PHS tennis coach.

“His goal was to hit the 100 mark,” Taylor said of his grandfather, who died in 1941.

“That (100th win) was as important to him as was that 2,000th consecutive game to Lou Gehrig,” Francis Hile wrote about A.C. Taylor in his Sport Beacon column in The Parkersburg Sentinel on June 2, 1938.

Bud Taylor has kept Parkersburg newspaper articles about his grandfather as PHS tennis coach. In 1938, the PHS tennis team was undefeated against West Virginia teams, The Sentinel reported. The remaining matches that year were against Ohio teams.

Several tennis players on A.C. Taylor’s teams won “junior singles and doubles championships,” the Sentinel reported. Bob Biddle of Parkersburg won the state tennis singles titles in 1929 and 1931.

A.C. Taylor, a native of Springfield, Ohio, taught mathematics and English at PHS for 16 and one-half years. “He was a brilliant, amazing man,” who could speak fluently in several foreign languages, Bud said.

A.C. Taylor loved flowers and gardening, Bud said. For many years he was the teacher of the Little Giants Sunday School class of young men at St. Paul’s United Methodist Church, according to A.C. Taylor’s obituary.

Contact Paul LaPann at plapann@newsandsentinel.com

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