Today's interviewee is Burton Kemp, Screven County's football play-by-play announcer and sports historian. Kemp is a former Screven football player and current history teacher. He has kept statistics and written articles about the football team for the local weekly newspaper for more than 40 years.
Burton Kemp, Screven County announcer and historian
1. What are your roles at Screven County, and how did your work and play with your alma mater begin? "On a resume, my primary job at Screven County High School is a part-time teacher. I have been teaching here for 41 years. I retired 10 years ago and have been teaching a pair of AP classes - U.S. History along with Government and Politics - since, and I truly thank all of the administrators for allowing me to do that. I also handle cumulative stats for all sports, primarily football. I write the stories for all sports for our local weekly, The Sylvania Telephone. I do the P.A. for softball, baseball and soccer, and I do play-by-play for our football webcasts. Once these webcasts were radio, but that has gone the way of the dinosaur. I played football here and graduated in 1975. I actually wrote football stories for the now defunct Screven County News my senior season [1974]. While attending Georgia Southern, I began keeping stats for the football team in the fall of 1975 and doing the football stories for the Telephone. With the exception of 1991 and 1992 I have done that since 1975. Since 1993, I have covered all sports. The most fun of everything is the broadcasting. In 1996, the late Nate Hirsch, the voice of the true GSU, bought the station [WZBX 106.5-FM] and paired me as a color guy with Ted Byrne, who had been the Sally League broadcaster of the year and is now in the Charleston Baseball Hall of Fame. Working with Ted was fantastic. We did baseball and basketball, as well. Ted left after the 2003 season, and I have been the play-by-play guy ever since, first for WZBX until it dropped high school sports two years ago and now for our webcast, which is all too dependent on internet quality."
2. What attracts you to your hometown and the history of it, in particular the sports aspect? "This is home is all I can say about what has kept me here. This is where my family and my wife's family grew up. My daddy always talked about Sylvania High football and coach Jack Lyons. I heard, and later recorded, a lot of guys talk about him. They put him on a pedestal. He came here in 1938 from the University of South Carolina, bringing with him boxes of used USC equipment. We became, and still are, the Gamecocks. Maybe those stories from so many older guys got me interested. In the summer of 1985, I took a graduate-level class at Georgia Southern that was focused around the state's sestercentennial. I did a paper on the evolution of sports at Sylvania High and then Screven County High School [1950]. At that time, copies of the Sylvania Telephone were available back beyond 1920. When the Telephone ceased to be locally owned, the new owners threw out the papers from prior to 1940; they were not bound. Even with papers, throughout its history, until the '70s, The Telephone did a very poor job of covering sports, sometimes missing coverage for entire seasons. I have tried to make up for that. A couple of years ago, I found out that the girls track team at Central High, the pre-integration black school, won a state championship. It was not in the paper back then, so I put together what I thought was a good feature on it. Maybe I do so much now to make sure that 50-60 years from now the current kids will not be forgotten."
3. Who are some of the best players to come out of Screven, and what's your favorite memory of a Screven football game? "We have not had a lot of players come through SCHS who went on to do truly great things in football afterwards, especially considering our history encompasses 70 years. Our one NFL player, the late Robert Waters, played here and at Presbyterian in the late '50s. He played for three years with the 49ers. I met him once, too old for me to have watched. The best player I have witnessed was Audrell Grace [1993-96]. Amazing Grace was a four-time all-stater who rushed for well over 6,000 yards. Michael Cooper comes to mind for his season in 2001. 'Coop' made the SEC all-freshmen team in 2002 while at UGA. Lately C.J. Wright is that player. He was benching nearly 500 pounds when he graduated, was a killer on defense and rushed for over 1,000 yards as a junior. Currently he is in the nose guard rotation at Georgia Southern. I have to mention Frank Johnson, who made 'The Catch' for Georgia Southern in 1985. If I have to single out one memory it would be the unbelievable buildup to the 1994 state championship game. We had been so bad, one season with more than seven wins in 30 years, for so long. We had not won a region championship since 1962. Of course then the game started, and Washington County happened. Broadcasting the state championship we won, the Georgia Dome, the 'Phantom Fair Catch' game are all great memories and all from 2002."
4. What is Screven County's identity in your mind? Not just football, but the county and Sylvania. How would you describe life there and the people and the high school? "This is a very rural community - 656 square miles with about 14,000 people - and everyone knows one another. You go to the grocery store, and there is always someone, more likely multiple people, you know to talk to. I have friends who live in metro Atlanta who go shopping in much larger stores than any we have and see not a single soul they know. I don't like that. It is a good place to retire. The county has remained small. My senior year, our subregion, 2-AA South, was Effingham County, now AAAAAA with a second high school; Statesboro, now AAAAA; and Bradwell Institute, now AAAAAA. Right now we have well below 600 students at SCHS. I will promise that your kids can get a great education here. My daughters certainly did. Teaching those two AP classes, I hope that I am a part of that. It sounds corny, but folks help one another here when times are bad. I don't know what we would do without the help of our locally owned businesses. Our leaders usually know how to stretch a dollar and get the most out of it. Our athletic facilities are as good as any around here for a school our size. Remember that our ESPLOST has no Wal-Mart from which to draw pennies. Our facilities were built with good management."
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