Closing two schools to form another can cause an interesting dilemma: What happens to athletic records? It was a problem that occurred for Trimble as well as Nelsonville-York High School and Athens High School, all three located in Athens County.
Trimble was established in 1964 with the current building put into place in 1973. It consolidated Glouster High School and Jacksonville-Trimble High School. Facing a decision of how to integrate the communities, Trimble kept the Tomcat mascot from Glouster High and the red and white colors from Jacksonville-Trimble.
The answers aren’t so easy to come up with. Because record keeping was not always a top priority, those past performances can be lost to time.
“I’m the stat and record guy for [Nelsonville-York] football and we actually didn’t have a record book for football until two years ago,” Nathan Dean said in a Facebook comment. “I gathered all of the data and put it together and when I was getting all of the info I could, I found out that Nelsonville High School and [Buchtel-York] didn’t have a record book at the time either.”
Dean later continued that if a set of records was created, it was lost and isn’t accessible anymore. The Buckeyes of N-Y now keep records and do have a small collection of top performances.
Nelsonville-York and Trimble are rivals with respect for one another. Back at the cross-town Trimble, record keeping was always important from even before the consolidation occurred. Trimble has maintained a steady database of records and even utilized the former Glouster and Jacksonville-Trimble schools. For some long-time Trimble fans, it is just one town coming together.
“[Jacksonville-Trimble] and Glouster and those people are still part of the sports program here so we’re able to get a lot of information from them,” Trimble head football coach Phil Faires said.
“I think of them as all one school, too,” Faires continued. “Records from both schools are still considered Trimble records.”