Robert E. Lee's Eli Crawford goes into a crowd of Martinsville players during the VHSL championship game Sunday, March 11, 2006.(Photo: File Photo)
Patrick Hite, Staunton News LeaderPublished 9:10 a.m. ET April 9, 2019
STAUNTON - When Paul Hatcher retired in 2011, he realized he had collected a lot of his basketball team's games on various forms of video and film.
For a few years after stepping down as the boys basketball coach at Robert E. Lee High School, Hatcher didn't do anything with the games, other than occasionally watch some of his favorite ones.
But his son, Jarrett Hatcher, who also coached the Leemen from 2011 through 2017 — the team won a state championship in 2017, giving the younger Hatcher a title to go along with the four his dad won over a 43-year coaching career — thought the videos should be made available to fans and former players.
The Hatchers began discussions with the company Glory Years, which offered to convert the game footage to a more modern technology. And, over the past few years, the company has been slowly converting the games to DVDs. They're also available online.
The cost of the DVDs or digital download is $15, although snippets of the games are available for free on GloryYears.com. There are more than 200 videos of Lee basketball available with more to come.
"And it's not just for the guys who played at Lee, but our opponents," Jarrett Hatcher said. "It's pretty neat."
A quick look on the website shows a 1991 game against Fort Defiance, a 1976 game against Waynesboro and a 1985 game against Harrisonburg. There are also some of the classic games that featured Lee's Mike Madden and Harrisonburg's Ralph Sampson from the late 1970s.
"Especially with the name change at the school there's been a lot of Lee High nostalgia," Hatcher said. "It's a good way for people to go back and, if you were a fan and maybe in middle school or high school and remember a game, those games are on there. It's a really neat concept."
