As the DHS basketball teams gear up to play their last game at the Rec tonight (girl’s game starts at 5p), principal Lauri McKain-Fernandez sends along this recent interview with Decatur’s legendary basketball coach Bob Reinhart, where he talks about his career in Decatur, great games at the Rec, and his anticipation for the new, on-campus facility.

Article and interview by sports writer Billy Banks…

When we moved to Atlanta in 1981 there was one word we heard more than any other, a word uttered on nearly a daily basis — “Sherman.” As in “Sherman burned this,” or “Sherman left us nothing but a dang chimney,” or “we had to bury the silverware so that rascal Sherman wouldn’t take it” and so forth. It was simply amazing to us, raised as we were in a distant border state, how many people talked about W.T. Sherman some 120 years after he left Georgia. When we moved to Decatur in 1987 we had a similar experience, and still do, every time we attend a game at the Legendary Decatur Rec Center. There’s hardly a game where someone doesn’t mention the name “Reinhart,” as in “this is the way we did things back in Reinhart’s day” (although no one’s ever claimed that Reinhart took their silverware). Read the rest of this entry »