When Edgecombe Community College began talking about beginning an alumni association, I got to thinking about ball games.

When we went back to school, it was always on a ball game weekend. Homecoming is a special time for the alums.

But ECC does not have a team. No football, basketball, baseball, softball, volleyball, golf or tennis team.

“We had some teams,” said Charlie Harrell, vice president of finance who has been there since the school opened in 1968 as Edgecombe Technical Institute.

"It was minimal," Harrell recalled. “Basketball in the early 1970s and golf in the 1980s, early 1990s. The golf team was fairly successful."

Gerald Abrams of Abrams Bar-B-Q fame in Tarboro coached the basketball team, which dressed out in red and white and played its games before standing room only crowds in area high school gyms. They practiced at North Edgecombe in Leggett.

"I remember it very well," said Abrams, 63. "Tarboro and South were two of the best teams in the state at the time, and I got some players and had a good team. It was fun."

Edge Tech played other two-year schools nearby, in Pitt, Lenoir, Ahoskie and Johnston counties.

“Ernest Pitt and James Cherry were real aces for us," Abrams said. "Pitt and Cherry could have played in the (Atlantic Coast Conference)."

"We were ‘The Rambling Wrecks from Edgecombe Tech,’" said Dr. Hartwell Fuller, who retired in 2004 after 36 years at ECC, the last 10 as president.

(ECC’s nickname is now Eagles, which the students adopted many years ago.)

Fuller remembers there being a golf team early on "because (the president) Charlie McIntyre was an avid golfer, a good golfer, and he wanted his son Staton to be able to play."

Ginny McLendon, dean, enrollment management, remembers having a women’s softball and a volleyball team for one year.

“Normally, athletics is too expensive for a community college," Fuller explained. "It serves only a very small number of students. It's difficult to take student fees up with just a small number of people involved."

ECC students pay 75 cents per credit hour. A full-time student taking a full load of 16 hours pays $12 per semester in student fees. State funds are prohibited from being used for athletics.

And this is a school still trying to get $75,000 from the county Board of Education because about 472 high school students attend classes on campus, plus another 106 are in the Early College High School.

However, most (more than 60 percent) of ECC's 2,500 students are part-time, many of whom (more than 50 percent) also have full or part-time jobs.

The ECC-Rocky Mount campus has had a men's team in the city recreation league for the last three years. And in March, the faculty and staff take on the students in basketball game that raises about $550 for the ECC Foundation.

"It's really hard when you're a commuter school," said McLendon, who's been at ECC since 1982. "We got out it because there was a lack of interest by the students."

That's a shame because its through athletics that interest is generated. That's why nearby N.C. Wesleyan College, a private Division III school, began a football team two years ago.

No, ECC does not need a football team, but a basketball team would make things interesting.

Tennis is the only athletics on current President Dr. Deborah Lamm’s mind. She would like to expand the curriculum and add a physical education course, tennis, for example.

“(Athletics) won’t be a part of our near future,” she said. “We don’t have the funding level at this time nor does the county. We would need external resources.”

Pitt, Lenoir, Cape Fear, Southeastern and several other community colleges in the state somehow manage to have strong athletic programs. Lenoir in Kinston has an 1,800-seat gym as part of its Student Union. Pitt in Greenville is renovating its baseball complex and building a new $300,000 fieldhouse.

ECC supporters can visit the trophy case in the library building on the Tarboro campus and wonder what might have been.

W. Terry Smith is editor of The Daily Southerner.