By Mike London
mike.london@salisburypost.com

SALISBURY — In a 1955 conference tournament basketball game near North Carolina’s border with Virginia, a tall female from Norlina High could not be stopped by the William R. Davie squad from Roanoke Rapids.

The lady’s name was Martha Ann Bowers. Nearly 70 years after her glory days, her name still pops up in the state record books.

Norlina’s athletic teams were called the Blue Waves.

The Norlina girls team was known as the Wavelets. Bowers scored the first 99 points — yes, the first 99 — for the Wavelets in that tournament game against William R. Davie. When a teammate scored to give the Wavelets 100 points, fans booed that poor girl, which tells you that even in 1955 fan behavior wasn’t always ideal.

Fans were happier, however, when Bowers went back to scoring a few more buckets. She finished with 107 points in a 111-28 victory.

Believe it or not, Bowers didn’t break the state scoring record for North Carolina. All she did was tie it.

Beulah Thompson scored 107 for New Hope High — that was in the Goldsboro area — in 1954. New Hope needed those points for a 120-111 win over Mount Olive.

While 107 points sounds insane today, a girl in Maryland is credited with the all-time national record. She scored 156 in one game.

Long story short, when someone asks about the most points ever scored by a girl in a Rowan County basketball game, it’s not a question that can be routinely answered, as girls haven’t always played high school hoops with the same rules or even with the same number of players.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Landis High coach Dan Hamrick had a girl, Melba Overcash, who was listed at 6-foot-7, but probably was even taller than that. Her coaches were good-sized men and she towered over them. Overcash had a number of physical issues, including a curved spine, but basketball brought her out of her shell and gave her goals to strive for.

Hamrick and assistant Ed Edmiston worked diligently with Overcash, who started out as a project, but learned to catch the ball cleanly and hold it over her head and push it into the hoop with deadly accuracy. With the rules of the time for ladies — she didn’t have to run the floor, she didn’t have to worry about playing defense and she didn’t have to worry about 3-second violations — she was virtually unstoppable. There were limits on the number of times a girl could dribble, but that didn’t really affect Overcash’s game. You had to foul her to prevent a layup and on the nights when she was making her free throws, the points piled up.

Hamrick usually pulled her out of games after Landis was assured of victory, but on the night of Jan. 17, 1950, Landis was playing East Spencer, and Hamrick left Overcash on the floor to see what would happen. He was curious. A lot of people were. How many could she get? She scored 102 points. Landis won the game 107-35.

So “Melba Overcash — 102” is one answer to the “who scored the most points in a Rowan girls basketball game” question.

But probably not the best answer.

Girls basketball in the 1950s was a game of 6-on-6, with two 3-on-3 games taking place within that game. Teams had three forwards who played only the offensive end of the floor and three guards who were confined to the defensive end. The guards had to be the most unselfish players of all time. If they scored, it was on a free throw. A team’s three forwards did 95 percent of the scoring, and usually one tall girl was the go-to option.

The decade of the 1950s saw the rise of talented female scorers at the small schools in the western portion of Rowan County.

Coach Oscar Stradley built a sports dynasty at Mount Ulla High and unleashed a lethal lady scorer named Shelby Rex, who became Shelby Rex Archie. In 1955-56, she averaged 51.6 points per game and had nights of 62, 63, 64 and 67 points. In her most famous effort, on Jan. 27, 1956, she scored a career-best 74 points as Mount Ulla beat Granite Quarry in an 86-85 thriller.

Cleveland also produced a superstar. Sandra Somers had games of 72 and 81 points against Rockwell in the late 1950s, shortly before Woodleaf, Mount Ulla and Cleveland were consolidated into West Rowan High.

The late ’50s and early ’60s saw the consolidation of all the small all-white schools in Rowan into larger schools.

Coached by Burt Barger, North Rowan’s Faith Wraight scored 40 points against West Rowan in the 1961-62 season and was the first to score 40 for one of the newly consolidated schools, but lots of rules tweaks soon eliminated the outlandish scoring totals so prevalent in the 1950s.

The game was evolving in the 1960s. The girls still played 6-on-6, but the concept of “rovers,” two athletic girls who played the entire floor, offense and defense, just like guys, was catching on. So now it was two guards, two forwards and two rovers.

The late 1960s brought full integration to Rowan high schools. The level of play, the depth of talent and the defensive intensity increased.

Girls were getting faster and taller. It was getting harder to score.

The early 1970s brought the long-awaited switch to 5-on-5 girls basketball. Girls finally got to play with the same rules as the guys. It had taken many decades for girls to be accepted as having the necessary stamina to play the full court game, but the modern era officially had arrived. Times were changing. It no longer was seen as a terrible thing for girls to break a sweat.

After Wraight’s 40-point game for North in 1961-62, there were no more 40-point games in Rowan County until the 1988-89 season when Lola Jones scored 41 for the Cavaliers against Southwest Guilford. Credit Jones with being the first to score 40 in the county using modern rules.

In the 1993-94 season, another dynamic North player coached by Gary Atwell ascended to the 40-point plateau. Stephanie Cross, who would top 2,000 points in her career for the Cavaliers, scored 43 on opening night against Lexington. She also scored 40 late that season against West Montgomery. Both games were tight victories. North needed every point Cross could provide.

In the 2002-03 season, Maggie Rich scored 40 points for East Rowan in a game against A.L. Brown. Rich remains the leading scorer in school history. Rich had a 38-point effort the next season, but her 40 still stands as the program’s lone 40-point game. Rich broke a school record of 37 that had been set by Linda McNair 43 years earlier against Monroe.

In the 2003-04 season, Sophilia Hipps produced a career-best 40-point game against West Rowan. She would surpass Cross as the leading scorer in North history with 2,264 career points.

In the 2022-23 season, North guard Bailee Goodlett had 40-point games in victories against Central Carolina Conference adversaries Thomasville and East Davidson.

Salisbury had Shayla Fields in that same era that North had Hipps, and they staged serious scoring duels. Fields became the first — and still the only — Hornet female to score 40 in a game.

Fields accomplished the feat three times — 42 against South Iredell in 2003-04, 43 against Mooresville in 2003-04 and a school-record 47 against Central Davidson in 2004-05.

Fields played with several 1,000-point scorers on very strong teams, but she still compiled a remarkable career scoring total of 2,783 points. That total is recognized as the record for Rowan County for either gender and regardless of the rules employed.

Donna Carr’s 38 points in a blowout of West Montgomery in 1994-95 stood as the Salisbury school record prior to Fields’ arrival.

West Rowan has featured a number of prolific scorers, including Abigail Wilson, the school’s career scoring leader who had 38-point and 39-point outings, but Ayana Avery is the only girl in program history to score 40 in a game.

Avery did it three times, all in the 2009-10 season. She had 40 against North Rowan, 41 against Carson and a school-record 42 against North Iredell.

South Rowan’s girls didn’t have a 40-point game until recent times.

Beth Miller scored 37 in the 1963-64 season against North Rowan. That stood as the school record for decades, Jill Cress matched Miller’s total in 1994-95 against R.J. Reynolds.

Avery Locklear shattered the record on opening night of the 2012-13 season with 43 points in an 82-65 win against Northwest Cabarrus.

Locklear would go on to break the school career scoring record, but Locklear’s record, in turn, would be smashed by the most prolific scorer in South history.

Janiya Downs, who now plays at Catawba, topped 40 points seven times — with all seven of those explosions coming during the 2018-19 season. Downs had games of 40, 42, 52, 53, 43, 42 and 44 points.

South was a 13-13 team her senior year. Downs usually scored a very high percentage of the Raiders’ points. Her 53-point game propelled South to a 76-72 win against North Davidson. In a 61-60 loss to West Davidson, Downs scored 53, 88 percent of South’s total.

That 53-point game is the modern record for Rowan County. It’s probably the best answer when people ask what Rowan girl scored the most points in a game.

Downs compiled the highest-scoring average for the modern era in 2018-19 — 32.3 points per game.

Carson hasn’t had a 40-point game yet, although Olivia Gabriel came close. She had 39 in an overtime win against South Rowan in 2015-16.

Mackenzie White scored 33 against East Rowan in Carson’s debut season in 2006-07. She held the school record until Kelly Dulkoski scored 36 against the Mustangs in the 2012-13 season. Gabriel will hold the record until that first 40-point scorer comes along at Carson.

It will happen at some point. Records are made to be broken.

But Downs’ seven 40-point games and 53-point outing have a chance to stick around at the top of the leaderboard for a while.