Editing Stem, North Carolina (section)

==Stem High School vs. UNC - Chapel Hill, 1936==

Long-time residents of Granville County recall the tale of how the Stem High School basketball team played and defeated the [[University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill]] men's team in an impromptu basketball game.<ref>Barnett, Ned "Did high school hoopsters humble mighty Heels?" The News & Observer [Raleigh] November 26, 2000: A1. Print.</ref>  As the story goes, the Stem team won the Granville County championship in 1936 and were rewarded by their coach (known only as Coach Pegram) with a trip to see UNC play [[Davidson College|Davidson]] at the [[Tin Can (basketball arena)|Tin Can]].  The Davidson team was unable to show because of a snowstorm, so Coach Pegram volunteered his team so that the crowd could still watch a game.  The team from Stem (Brent Meadows, Wallace Bowling, Thomas Farabow, Clyde Cates, and James "Bunk" Guthrie) played well against their college opponents, and in the end won the game on a dramatic last-second shot.

The story is unverified in contemporaneous sources.  If the game occurred, it is most likely to have taken place on February 12, 1936, when an [[influenza]] outbreak caused the cancellation of a UNC/Davidson basketball game.<ref>[https://archive.org/download/dailytarheel_sep22_1935_may31_1936/dailytarheel_sep22_1935_may31_1936_0432.jpg The Daily Tar Heel, February 12, 1936]</ref>  "Bunk" Guthrie would have been 22 years old at the time and 4 years past his graduation (though the Stem team was disqualified from the 1934 county championship for using ineligible players, so this does not necessarily rule out his participation in 1936).  The [[Daily Tar Heel]] from February 13, 1936, mentions only that the team practiced on the date of the cancelled Davidson game to prepare for their upcoming contest against [[NCSU|North Carolina State]].<ref>[https://archive.org/download/dailytarheel_sep22_1935_may31_1936/dailytarheel_sep22_1935_may31_1936_0436.jpg The Daily Tar Heel, February 13, 1936]</ref>  The story (true or not) has become a piece of local legend and brought statewide attention to the town of Stem in 1999 when it was covered by Frank Newell for the Warren Record of [[Warren County, North Carolina|Warren County]], and again in 2000 when it was covered by Ned Barnett on the front page of the [[News and Observer|News & Observer]].