Hartem sports treasures sold at silent auction

[September 26, 2011]  HARTSBURG -- The players are off the court, batters left the field and runners crossed the final finish line years ago, but symbols of their glory days are still gracing school trophy cases across the country. Last Saturday over 700 of Hartsburg and Hartsburg-Emden High School trophies and sports memorabilia went up for bids at a silent auction, and memories flooded the gym.

It wasn't that the school didn't want them, or that they didn't have sentimental value and didn't still stand for the talent, skills and sportsmanship of past athletes, band members and musicians, but there just wasn't a good place to store them.

"The majority of these items were stored in what was once the cafeteria," coach Jennifer Hayes explained. "It is in the basement level and became storage area when the new cafeteria was built. The fire marshal was concerned about the boxes and stacks of trophies, so we had to do something."

It started last April and turned into a major project after more and more pieces were found and gathered together. Saturday's silent auction displayed 758 trophies, plaques and banners from basketball and baseball tournaments, track meets, and band competitions.

What the school kept:

• Junior high first-place banners from state competition and all state trophies.

• High school trophies and banners from regional, sectional, supersectional and state competitions, and any plaques from the school's current affiliation in the varsity Tomahawk Conference.

Coach Hayes, Hartem's sixth-grade teacher and junior high and high school volleyball coach, used the project as a math lesson and good will project for the school. Her students created a spreadsheet to list and organize the items and put them in numerical order according to year. Their results were used to list the memorabilia on the school's website. Each item had a starting bid of $10.

A lot of conversation and laughter could be heard Saturday as alumni wandered around the gym, finding trophies from their years at the school and reminiscing.

At the request of their daughter, Anna, Lawrence and Debra Groth bid on son-in-law Brian Melton's high school basketball trophies. He played for Hartem from 1985-89. The Meltons now live in St. Petersburg, Fla.

At the end of the day, the school made over $1,000 from the auction, and Hayes estimated that about one-third of the items were sold.

[By MARLA BLAIR]