Jim Barber and Skeeter Parker have written a book about the Berrien High School Rebelette’s first state championship win in 1970. 

NASHVILLE — Jim Barber was in second grade when the Berrien Rebelettes won their first ever state basketball title in 1970. He attended his first game and fell in love with the team and sport. The players became his heroes.

Fifty years later, he and Skeeter Parker have co-written a book about that season, “They Made Good Great: The Story of the 1969-1970 Berrien High School Rebelettes and Their State Championship Season.”

The book is available via Barber’s website, jimbarber.me. Copies are $25 each, which includes shipping and handling. All proceeds from sales will be donated to the Berrien Historical Foundation. There are plans to sell copies through the Historical Foundation as well.

“I hope it honors these women and what they accomplished,” he said.

Also available on Barber’s site are his other works. “Plowed Fields” has picked up rave reviews and hit No. 3 on Amazon’s bestseller list in saga fiction. It is available as both a trilogy and as a single volume.

Barber said he first thought of writing the book 30 years ago. “But I was busy with life at that point and just never got around to it,” he said. “So, I put it to the side, but it’s always been in the back of my mind.”

The book took a step forward when Barber began talking to Parker, resident Berrien historian. Among his works, Parker has researched and published Berrien High football history and the county’s weather history. Parker has a repository of newspaper articles about athletics history. Barber said he began reading the ones about the 1969-70 season, which spurred both men to take action.

“We talked, and the 50th anniversary was coming up,” said Barber. In addition to being such a big milestone — not just the 50th anniversary of a state basketball title, but Berrien’s first ever state title in any sport — he realized he was curious about other aspects. “I would love to find out what happened to these women,” he said, “how they felt about that season.”

Once interviews began, there really weren’t surprises in the responses Barber received. Except for one thing: None could remember the score from the state championship game against Waycross (37-32). 

The 1969-70 season began a bit awkwardly. Girls basketball in Georgia was six-on-six, three guards at one end of the floor, three forwards on the other. Players could not cross the center line. There had been talk by the Georgia High School Association to going to rovers that year, but that was shelved for one more season. Rovers still featured six players per team on the floor, but two could cross the center line and play end-to-end.

In the book, players said they believed that training made them a more rounded team. Barber believes they were the best in the state that year, regardless of classification.”They were so athletic and so tall,” he said.

Barber pointed out another difference of that era: Berrien was in Class AA. They remain in the classification now, but in 1970, it meant something different. GHSA classifications then spanned from C to AAA. Berrien was considered a higher populated school than most. In 2020, that would translate to be roughly Class AAAAA or AAAAAA. (Berrien would similarly classified as an AAA school for four years after the GHSA added Class AAAA in 1978.)

The championship set Berrien up for future years, he said. Many team veterans worked with young players, teaching them the craft of the game.

The Rebelettes’ championship was years in the making. When head coach Stanley Simpson arrived in 1961, the team didn’t even have a home gym. He steadily built both boys and girls into regional, then state powerhouses.

Simpson had the reputation of a taskmaster.

“Those girls put in some incredibly hard work,” said Barber. “I just can’t imagine the conditioning they went through, the relentlessness of Simpson, the pressure he put on them. When you go through that kind of fire, you come out very strong.”

Barber does feel he waited too long to begin the project of putting together “They Made Good Great.” 

“When you’re 50 years past, I don’t think you can remember things quite as well,” he said. In the book, Barber said some declined to have their names attached to any quotes because they didn’t feel they remembered that time well enough.

The authors are already at work on another project. Barber and Parker will be tackling a second book about Berrien basketball, one for the 50th anniversary of the Rebels’ lone state basketball championship in 1971. Like the girls team, they also went undefeated