Lamkin's Role In Apprentice School Sports

He first coached the baseball team in the early 1920s, and throughout the four decades that followed, Gordon "Pop" Lamkin continued to be an integral figure in Apprentice School athletics. As versatile as he was, there were times when he served as head coach for as many as three different varsity sports in a single year. In 1959, one of his busiest years as a coach for the Builders, Lamkin headed up the football, basketball and track teams, and oddly, at this late point of his career, he was in charge of all of the school's major sports programs, with the exception of coaching baseball, the position in which he started in 1921. Realizing that he had reached a time when he should reduce his workload, the 65-year-old Lamkin decided to come back for a final year of coaching for The Apprentice School. For his swan song, he agreed to coach the 1959-60 basketball team, a squad which afforded him only a handful of returning lettermen. Even then, he was able to coax the A's into an early-season rally, winning four of the first six games on the schedule. However, inexperience ultimately took its toll. And in spite of outstanding showings by machinery designer, Homer Nicely, who topped the
Heflin, a former standout athlete from the College of William and Mary, who arrived in Newport News with an impressive resume and high recommendations from the athletic department of his alma mater. He had coached the Tribe's junior varsity team for several seasons before coming to The Apprentice School. But even with his experience and extensive knowledge of the game, he soon found that coaching a varsity squad of shipbuilding apprentices would require a different approach than that of coaching freshmen football players at a prestigious university, which at the time had an enrollment of nearly 4,000 students. Coach Heflin's first season with the Builders was a season of adjustments and unexpected