The Late Akers Played During Mountain State’s Peak Era of Sports
August 19, 2026 01:42 PM | Men's Basketball
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By: John Antonik
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – During my morning commute to work today, my mind was on Willie Akers and his recent passing.
Specifically, I was thinking about Willie's era of sports in the Mountain State during the 1950s, perhaps the greatest decade of athletic talent this state ever produced.
Of course, first and foremost on the list of elite West Virginia products was the incomparable Jerry West, whom Pittsburgh sportswriter Roy McHugh once memorably wrote "does not come in pairs."
Mark Workman, Rod Hundley, Rod Thorn, Leo Byrd and Hal Greer were some of the other top hardwood products who opted to remain in-state at West Virginia and Marshall.
Football, too, produced some of the finest athletes this state has ever seen, rough-and-tumble players like Sam Huff, Bruce Bosley, Chuck Howley and several others.
Most of the members of the 11-player 1958 Big School all-state team went on to play college football, including Dave Santrock, Phil Sizemore, Bob Fuller, George Nedeff and Jim Moss at West Virginia, and Larry Spurlock at Marshall.
Weirton's Mike Tomasovich signed with Georgia Tech, Weirton's Tom Bloom went to Purdue, Welch's Sonny Villani played at Duke while Fairmont Senior's Larry Drake ended up at Grambling.
The Class 2A all-state list included Larry Jasper (New Mexico), Burl Jones and Jim Procopio (West Virginia) and Bobby Whaley (Army), while the small school all-state team featured Sisterville's Jim Faddoul and Middlebourne's Gene Lamb (West Virginia), and Winfield's Bill Bryant (Georgia Tech).
In the early 1950s, when these guys were growing up here following World War II, the state's mining industry was operating at peak capacity. The chemical industries in the Kanawha and Ohio Valleys were also thriving, steel was prominent in the Upper Ohio Valley, and consequently, there were many more people living here then than there are today.
Since 1950, the state has lost close to a half-million residents to other parts of the country, many of them potential ballplayers.
Back in the early 1950s, West Virginia coaches took advantage of the significant talent pool they had at their disposal without much fanfare. Some parts of West Virginia were simply too hard for college recruiters to reach, places like Green Bank where Bosley grew up.
Football coach Art Lewis was tipped off about Bosely, subsequently loaned him to the North coaches for the annual North-South High School Football All-Star game in the summer under the provision that they keep other college recruiters away from him, and then watched him blossom into a star player at West Virginia University.
Around that time, WVU had a terrific sports information director (then called publicity director) named Eddie Barrett, who did his job well.
Sometimes he did his job too well, unfortunately for Lewis and basketball coach Fred Schaus.
Barrett began referring to West Virginia's basketball players as "country slickers" in catchy press releases that were getting picked up by the national wire services and metropolitan newspapers when the team started appearing in the top-20 rankings.
He also convinced Lewis to capitalize on his football team's success in the mid-1950s by agreeing to a couple of interviews for expansive feature stories in some of the popular national magazines of the time.
The angle, of course, being Lewis was discovering unknown and unheralded West Virginia prospects and turning them into great college football players.
It made Lewis look like an old prospector with the Midas Touch, but it also had a downside – other coaches began taking a much closer look at some of these hidden Mountain State gems.
One of them was Virginia Tech basketball coach Chuck Noe, an avid newspaper box score reader. Noe would look at the scores of the games in Virginia and see them being played in the 40s and 50s, and then he would see the West Virginia scores in the 80s and 90s and decided that he wanted some of those guys in Blacksburg.
One other factor to consider, specifically relating to basketball, was that some of the state's most outstanding coaches, such legendary names as Jerome Van Meter, Lewis D'Antoni, Everett Brinkman and Roy E. Williams, were producing great teams and players at the time.
All of this drew attention to West Virginia, and soon most of its secrets were no more.
Noe specifically targeted the Kanawha Valley and the Beckley-Princeton-Bluefield area for his carpetbagging raids, eventually narrowing his search to 6-foot-6 Charleston High star Chris Smith.
West Virginia missed out on the services of Charleston center Chris Smith, whom many at the time believed was the missing piece to a national basketball championship in 1959 (Submitted photo)
The Mountain Lion center was a year behind West and Akers as the state's No. 1 senior prospect in the spring of 1957.
Schaus was also in hot pursuit of the Charleston star, figuring he would be a great replacement for graduating 6-foot-10 senior All-American center Lloyd Sharrar.
There were two catches, however.
Smith wanted to study chemical engineering and Virginia Tech had a great engineering program, and he also wanted to play college basketball with some of his Charleston High teammates.
Noe was willing to take on some of the excess in order to get Smith, who wound up being one of the finest players in Hokie basketball history. He averaged a remarkable 18.6 points and 17.1 rebounds per game for his collegiate career, and many onlookers believe he was the missing piece to those powerhouse West Virginia teams of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
By that time, the Mountaineers were severely undersized with 6-foot-5 Akers and 6-foot-6 walk-on Bob Clousson being the team's two-best inside players in 1959, and Akers and 6-foot-5 Jim Ritchie in 1960.
What West Virginia was lacking was a dominant player of Smith's caliber near the basket to handle some of the bigs the Mountaineers sometimes struggled to contain.
West Virginia's biggest nemesis was 6-foot-7 William & Mary center Jeff Cohen, who poured in 34 points and grabbed 20 rebounds in the Tribe's 94-86 upset victory at Norfolk's City Arena on Jan. 30, 1960. That snapped West Virginia's remarkable 56-game Southern Conference winning streak spanning five years, later regarded by some sports historians among the most notable accomplishments in college basketball history.
In the 1959 national championship game a year prior, California's 6-foot-10 center Darrall Imhoff rebounded his missed shot to make the deciding basket with 17 seconds left, denying the Mountaineers an opportunity to win their first NCAA title.
Cal won the game because it had a 6-foot-10 center and West Virginia didn't.
Onlookers believed Smith was the missing ingredient to West Virginia winning a national championship that year, and perhaps another in 1960.
Many years later, I brought up the subject of Chris Smith to Schaus, and he conceded that he would have helped immensely. By the way, Schaus pointed out that he almost had John Havlicek in the fold before Ohio State entered the fray late in the recruiting process. Havlicek had played for Schaus' West Virginia teammate Bobby Carroll at Bridgeport (Ohio) High and would have bridged the gap nicely between West and Thorn.
But back to Smith.
"He would have fit the puzzle perfectly for us," the coach recalled in 2005. "Chris Smith was just the kind of guy that we needed on those ballclubs. Lloyd Sharrar filled the bill quite well (in 1958), but we needed a big, strong center that could score and play defense and Chris Smith was all that. He was also just a great human being."
The coach continued.
"The distance from the southern part of the state to Morgantown back then really hurt us because several members of his family had gone to Virginia schools," he explained. "So, we really had two strikes against us trying to recruit Chris because of the fact that Charleston was a lot easier for those southern schools to get to rather than him coming to Morgantown, but he would have looked pretty nice to have a WVU uniform on."
As to whether Smith would have delivered West Virginia a national title or two, as many have postulated, Schaus offered a brilliant reply.
"Chuck Noe always said if Jerry West had gone to Virginia Tech, they would have won the national championship as well. He probably was right," Schaus concluded.
By the way, Smith had an unblemished record in his games against the Mountaineers. His Hokie teams lost them all!
Indeed, it was a remarkable period in time for Mountain State sports back in the 1950s, and the late Willie Akers was among those playing an important role in its growth and development.
