Great moments in BFS Basketball, 1925 and today

1925, BFS Boys Basketball Team,
with the Friends School League
Championship Trophy

It's a great basketball season for BFS teams, so today let's look back 89 years ago to February of 1925, when BFS won the Friends Schools national title in boys basketball by defeating Wilmington Friends. The BFS Digital Archives has this photo of our 1925 boys basketball team, with the Friends School trophy, which rests just outside our lower gym at Pearl Street today.



That 1925 championship game was covered in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle and took place on February 23, 1925, but The Brooklyn Daily Eagle's February 8, 1925 article "Brooklyn Friends Team After National Title" anticipated the championship with this great photo spread featuring our players and coach Alan M. Hughes. Incidentally, Mr. Hughes left BFS in the early 1940s to run the athletics program at Wilmington Friends. Since someone might notice a seeming discrepancy in The Eagle's articles: our school colors were gray and white in 1925, our blue and gray came to BFS in the 1930s.

All about our 1925 boys basketball team

And what of today's teams at BFS? Take a moment to watch this video for a buzzer-beating 3-pointer from our own Brendan G. during last week's game against St. Ann's, which gave BFS a 51-50 victory. And this photo of that moment was just published in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle only last week (that newspaper's been back for a few years, friends).

2014, an amazing BFS Buzzer Beater

Have to share my appreciation to Thomas M. Tryniski of Old Fulton NY Post Cards for his incredible work in making millions of pages of NY State historical newspapers freely accessible online. It is so easy to lose oneself for days there, just researching and reading, that I limit the time I spend using it. This has been one of my favorite research tools for at least ten years.

I want to share my appreciation also to David Dyte, mathematician, sports historian and author of the beautiful book of photographs As Seen in Brooklyn now available at Blurb. David and I communicated about the history of Friends Field some years back, and he later ran across the February 8, 1925 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article at Mr. Tryniski's above-mentioned historical newspaper site and kindly shared it with me. Historians enjoy collaboration, it so helps historical understanding and interpretation.